This paper proposes a complete system for robotic sensor placement in initially unknown arbitrary three-dimensional environments. The system uses a novel approach for computing the quality of acquisition of a mobile sensor group in such environments. The quality of acquisition is based on a geometric model of a camera which allows accurate sensor models and simple occlusion computation. The proposed system combines this new metric with a global derivative-free optimization algorithm to find simultaneously the number of sensors and their configuration to sense accordingly the environment. The presented framework compares favourably with current techniques working in two-dimensional environments. Furthermore, simulation and experimental results demonstrate the ability of the system to cope with full three-dimensional environments, a domain still unexplored by previous methods.

Geometric discrepancies are standard measures to quantify the irregularity of distributions. They are an important notion in numerical integration. One of the most important discrepancy notions is the so-called star discrepancy. Roughly speaking, a point set of low star discrepancy value allows for a small approximation error in quasi-Monte Carlo integration. It is thus the most studied discrepancy notion.

This paper proposes a self-adaptation mechanism to manage the resources allocated to the different species comprising a cooperative coevolutionary algorithm. The proposed approach relies on a dynamic extension to the well-known multi-armed bandit framework. At each iteration, the dynamic multi-armed bandit makes a decision on which species to evolve for a generation, using the history of progress made by the different species to guide the decisions. We show experimentally, on a benchmark and a real-world problem, that evolving the different populations at different paces allows not only to identify solutions more rapidly, but also improves the capacity of cooperative coevolution to solve more complex problems.

Many fields rely on some stochastic sampling of a given complex space. Low-discrepancy sequences are methods aiming at producing samples with better space-filling properties than uniformly distributed random numbers, hence allowing a more efficient sampling of that space. State-of-the-art methods like nearly orthogonal Latin hypercubes and scrambled Halton sequences are configured by permutations of internal parameters, where permutations are commonly done randomly. This paper proposes the use of evolutionary algorithms to evolve these permutations, in order to optimize a discrepancy measure. Results show that an evolutionary method is able to generate low-discrepancy sequences of significantly better space-filling properties compared to sequences configured with purely random permutations.