Evolutionary construction of an immune network-based behavior arbitration mechanism for autonomous mobile robots

Abstract

In recent years, in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), much attention has been focused on reactive planning approaches such as behavior-based AI and new AI. However, a criticism of these approaches is that their arbitration among competence modules is fixed against dynamically changing environments. On the other hand, biological information processing systems have various interesting characteristics from an engineering viewpoint. Among them, the immune system plays an important role in maintaining its own system against dynamically changing environments. Based on this fact, we have investigated a new decentralized consensus-making system for the behavior arbitration of autonomous mobile robots, inspired by the idiotypic network hypothesis in immunology. In this paper, we illustrate the usefulness of our proposed method by means of computer simulations and experiments. © 1998 Scripta Technica. Electr Eng Jpn, 123(3): 1–10, 1998