Ada: constructing a synthetic organism

Despite immense progress in neuroscience, we remain restricted in our ability to construct autonomous behaving robots that match the competence of even simple animals. The barriers to the realisation of this goal include: the lack of knowledge of system integration issues, engineering limitations and organisational constraints common to many research laboratories. In this paper we describe our approach to addressing these issues by constructing an artificial organism within the framework of the Ada project - a large-scale public exhibit for the Swiss Expo.02 national exhibition.