Animal-like Behavior Design of Small Robots by the Model of Subjective World and Behavior

抄録

This paper proposes an approach to designing animal-like behavior of autonomous robots with use of a five-layered hierarchical model of the relation between the subjective world and behavior. The hierarchy of behavior includes reflex motion, detour and a limited use of temporal and spatial information of environments. The corresponding subjective world has 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 the subjective world and bihavior is that a level in the hierarchy of the subjective world is activated when an action on tme immediately lower level is obstructed, and that the activated level of the subjectivity selects and drives a higher action. With this software architecture, all the five levels of bihavior were experimented successfully with use of two small mobile robots. Their instantaneous subjective world is visualized on the screen of a host personal computer controlling robot motion, and the real time screen image of the robot's subjective world helped to design robots' behavior as a bilateral human interface.