Evolution of Consciousness Systems with Bacteria

Abstract

Disasters are characterized by extreme situations where human-made structures are partially or completely destroyed. Earthquakes, landslides, cyclones, floods are that type of phenomena. This paper presents an outdoor autonomous mobile robot named MARCOS, which uses consciousness (set of codelets) to derive its world map and avoid obstacles. Disaster zones constitute a dramatic environment where obstacles and dangerous conditions require extra flexibility and good reasoning capabilities upon unexpected situations. The aim of this work is to show statistically how performs traditional consciousness for complex avoidance and compares it with solutions provided by a human following a novel approach called artificial bacterial infection. Results show that bacteria are a good artifact to enhance original robotic consciousness, providing originality, and mainly variety in the strategies considered by the robot. Therefore, it increments the possibility to devise wiser paths that will compete with traditional ones. A unique type of evolutive consciousness emerges from this: not only considering current codelets generating consciousness but also evolving them into diverse paths and even generating new ones. As part of this paper’s scope, the basics of such artificial bacterial infection is also presented.