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On Mimicking the Effects of the Reality Gap with Simulation-Only Experiments

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Swarm Intelligence (ANTS 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11172))

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Abstract

One issue in the automatic design of control software for robot swarms is the so-called reality gap—the difference between reality and the simulation models used in the automatic design process. It is commonly understood that the reality gap manifests itself as a drop in performance when control software developed in simulation is used to control physical robots. Yet, often disregarded is the relative nature of this performance drop: the reality gap does not affect equally all instances of control software. Indeed, one might observe a rank inversion: control software A might perform better than control software B in simulation, but perform worse on robots. The possibility of rank inversion undermines any performance comparison made in simulation. It would thus seem the only way to assess control software is in robot experiments, which are costly and time consuming. We argue it is unnecessary to assume reality is more complex than simulation models for the effects of the reality gap to occur. Indeed, we show that performance drop and rank inversion can occur if one automatically designs control software in simulation using a model and then assesses it in simulation on another model—what we call a pseudo-reality. Our results suggest that an appropriately conceived pseudo-reality could be used to test automatically-generated control software for performance drop and rank inversion, without performing robot experiments.

All experiments were performed by AL. The paper was drafted by AL and revised by the two authors. The research was directed by MB.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Confidence intervals are computed based on the statistic of the paired Wilcoxon signed rank test. The normal approximation is adopted as the sample size is larger than 50. The implementation used is the one of R’s stats package [37].

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Acknowledgements

The project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 681872). Mauro Birattari acknowledges support from the Belgian Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – FNRS.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Antoine Ligot & Mauro Birattari

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  1. Antoine Ligot
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  2. Mauro Birattari
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Correspondence to Mauro Birattari .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Marco Dorigo

  2. Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Mauro Birattari

  3. Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Bellaterra, Spain

    Christian Blum

  4. University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

    Anders L. Christensen

  5. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Andreagiovanni Reina

  6. National Research Council, Rome, Italy

    Vito Trianni

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Ligot, A., Birattari, M. (2018). On Mimicking the Effects of the Reality Gap with Simulation-Only Experiments. In: Dorigo, M., Birattari, M., Blum, C., Christensen, A., Reina, A., Trianni, V. (eds) Swarm Intelligence. ANTS 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11172. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00533-7_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00533-7_9

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