Animal-like behavior design of small robots by consciousness-based architecture

摘要

This paper proposes an aproach to designing animal-like behavior of autonomous robots with use of a five-layered hierarchical model of the relation between consciousness and behavior. The hierarchy of behavior includes reflex motion, detour, and a limited use of temporal and spatial information of environments. The corresponding consciousness has an emotion-valued coordinate system, stably lasting emotion that enables an animal to detour an obstacle for a prey, and symbolic information on time and space. The basic idea of the software architecture realizing the above model of consciousness and behavior is that a level in the hierarchy of consciousness is activated when an action on the immediately lower level is obstructed and that the activated level of consciousness selects and drives a higher behavior. With this software architecture, all the five levels of behavior were successfully shown by experiment with the use of two small mobile robots. Their instantaneous consciousness is visualized on the screen of a host computer controling robot motion and the screen image of the robot's consciousness works to design behaviors as a bilateral human interface.