Artificial systems and complex behaviours

This paper describes some experiments on control strategies of a mobile robot. The robot has a simple vision system and moves in a simplified world, but the controlling architecture performs tasks of increasing complexity, such as the exploration of a maze, the recovery of its structure and the planning of some nearly optimal trajectories through the maze. There are three layers of control of robot motion: the lowest layer analyses images, controls the speed of robot wheels and is essentially an optomotor reflex; the second layer has a short term memory and operates when the visual information is not complete or when the robot has lost its way; the third layer has a long term memory and reasoning capabilities, monitors the achievement of robot tasks and schedules the timing of completion of the different tasks. The vision and motor systems and other supervising units are assumed to be finite state automata and the control architecture is based on transitions between states of these automata. The control system is flexible and new capabilities are easily acquired by simply introducing new states. The intelligent behaviour of this artificial system is primarily caused by the memory and the capability to create simple and useful representations of the world