Ecological Robotics: A Schema-theoretic Approach

摘要

An in-depth understanding and dynamic modeling of the relationship a robot has with its environment (i.e., the overall ecology) is important to ensure that fielded robotic systems are: ¯ Not competing with other agents that can do the task more effectively and hence prove themselves useless. ¯ Successful competitors within the ecological system and can potentially displace less efficient agents. ¯ Ecologically sensitive so that agent-environmental system dynamics are well-modeled and as predictable as possible whenever new robotic technology is introduced. Little emphasis to date has been placed on this ecological approach within mobile robotics research, although some related research has been conducted in the recent past in tile context of the artificial life community. All too often, however, these approaches lack both a strong biological basis for their working assumptions and any formal underpinnings (neural, behavioral, and computational) for the results they obtain. We address these problems directly using schema theory and neurophysiological and ethological models to provide credible, generalizable, and useful results in this domain. These systems are currently grounded in robotic simulations and ultimately in actual robotic hardware. The study of sensory guided behaviors in living animals has become of general significance not only for scientists working in neuroscience and computational neuroscience but also for scientists working in robotics and distributed artificial intelligence, who are using functional principles generated from the study of living animals as models to build computer based automata that display complex sensorimotor behaviors. Our research effort, which follows these lines, is tied together by software tools including: NSL, a neural simulation