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Evolving Scout Agents for Military Simulations (2015)
Brian D. Boyles
Simulations play an increasingly significant role in training and preparing the military, particularly in environments with constrained budgets. Unfortunately, in most cases a small number of people must control a large number of simulated vehicles and soldiers. This often leads to micromanagement of computer-controlled forces in order to get them to exhibit the human-like characteristics of an enemy force. This thesis uses Neuroevolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) to train neural networks to perform the role of scouts which analyze the terrain and decide where to place themselves to best observe the enemy forces. The main attribute that the scout agents consider is a vapor flow rate from the enemy starting location to their intended objective, which according to previous studies indicates likely chokepoints along the enemy route. This thesis experiments with different configurations of sensors and fitness functions in order to maximize how much of the enemy team is spotted over the course of the scenario. The results show that these agents perform better than randomly placed scouts and better than scouts deployed using heuristics in many situations, although not consistently so. Evolutionary optimization of scout agents using vapor flow is thus a promising approach for developing autonomous scout agents in military simulations.
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Citation:
Masters Thesis, Department of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, 2015.
Bibtex:
@mastersthesis{boyles:ms15, title={Evolving Scout Agents for Military Simulations}, author={Brian D. Boyles}, school={ Department of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin}, address={Austin, TX}, url="http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/?boyles:ms15", year={2015} }
People
Brian D. Boyles
Masters Alumni
bboyles [at] utexas edu
Software/Data
BBMS
BBMS is software for Brian Boyles's Masters thesis on evolving scout agents for military simulations. It includes a simu...
2015
Areas of Interest
Evolutionary Computation
Neuroevolution
Applications