Chapter 12: Robotics

A world in which the actions of the agents alter the world and force those agents to establish a revised view of that world.

The biological world (humans, animals)

The behavioral approach

Robotics attempt to simulate observable activities of an organism

A map or transformation of the sensory data into motor action. They’re representations of sequences of elementary actions that are stored in our brain.

Actions that last as long as the stimulus that produced them and whose magnitude is proportional to the intensity of the stimulus.

Actions that continue for a longer period of time than the stimulus

Learned behaviors and consolidated such that they are executed without conscious thought. Subsets of such responses include taxes where the organism moves to a particular orientation (e.g. hatching turtles move to the ocean using reflected moonlight)

Study of animal behavior

The four ways of acquiring behavior were proposed by Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen.

A machine or control mechanism designed to automatically follow a predetermined sequence of operations, or respond to predetermined instructions

It’s a built-in neural structure which when exposed to a specific stimuli (also called releasers) will cause the release of an automatic behavioral response (motor action sequence)

• Equilibrium (behaviors balance each other our) • Dominance (one IRM prevails) • Cancellation (fight or flight can initiate 3rd behavior)

perceivable environmental elements that are suitable triggers for an action

A robotic primitive includes that part of robotic system that converts elements of an environment into information that is made available to other parts of the robotic system

a philosophy or approach for developing theories and for analyzing and evaluating a class of problems including appropriate analytical tools and associated techniques.

One of the robotic paradigms also referred to as the “top-down” approach to robotic design. It reflects how humans include “planning” as a key element in their completion of given tasks. The classical robot designed according to this principle (“Shakey”) used Strips algorithm which is a variant of the General Problem Solver.

A robotic primitive element encompassing the corresponding human attributes of reasoning and cognition

A robotic primitive that pertains to the actuating or motor elements of an intelligent agent.

Paradigm developed from the idea that complex behaviors grow out of simple behaviors that operate in a concurrent manner.

A robotic architecture characterized by direct connection between perceptive elements (sensory info) and actuating elements (sense-action processes)

Designs that use a combination of reactive behaviors and planning or other cognitive components.

Learned behaviors consolidated such that they are executed without conscious thought

He began to investigate abstract models of animal intelligence including both biological and cognitive elements, in order to gain insights into robotics.