A robot behavior-learning experiment using Particle Swarm Optimization for training a neural-based animat

We investigate the use of particle swarm optimization (PSO), and compare with genetic algorithms (GA), for a particular robot behavior-learning task: the training of an animat behavior totally determined by a fully-recurrent neural network, and with which we try to fulfill a simple exploration and food foraging task. The target behavior is simple, but the learning task is challenging because of the dynamic complexity of fully-recurrent neural networks. We show that standard PSO yield very good results for this learning problem, and appears to be much more effective than simple GA.