Self-sufficient and autonomous robots necessarily make their own decisions. As designers of robots we need ways of assessing their behaviour. A functional method, called the basic cycle which is based on the utility of the robot owner, is proposed to assess the robot's performance within an environmental niche. The method allows judgements to be made on the robot's use of time or energy, as well as being able to compare alternative robots' performance. A mechanistic method of implementing robot behaviour sequencing - having reason to perform comparably to a utility maximising method - is proposed, and demonstrated to behave opportunistically in both a computer simulation and an actual robot experiment. Keywords : Behaviour Sequencing; Action Selection; Motivation; Optimality; Autonomous Agent; Adaptive Behaviour. 1 Introduction Self-sufficient and autonomous robots necessarily make their own decisions. As designers of robots we need ways of assessing their behaviour which are suffici...

In this paper we present a motivational mechanism to generate and determine the worth of goals and to represent various constraints involved in satisfying a goal. The work builds on the SMART agent framework and adds to the growing body of work that is attempting to extend the abilities of autonomous agents past the constraints of the traditional symbolic approaches to AI. The paper represents a first step in increasing an agent's autonomy in the domain of ecommerce, specifically enabling the agent to dynamically set issue parameters in relation to the importance of the issue and the effects of any existing constraints.

Any self-sufficient autonomous agent faces multiple tasks to which it must sequence its behaviour if it is to manage its time appropriately. This paper considers the minimal multiple task scenario - the two resource problem. Some possible mechanisms, inspired from ideas in ethology and having claim to perform optimally when analysed mathematically, are considered: one based on cost functions and another based on motivational tendencies. Several variants of the mechanisms are implemented and tested in a continuous two dimensional simulation environment under a variety of conditions. Those mechanisms closely linked to cost functions do not perform well, are not adaptive, and dither. The mechanisms based on motivational tendencies perform better, are more adaptive, and demonstrate opportunism. The difficulty of finding effective mechanisms by using a functional perspective is noted. 1 Introduction Any autonomous agent needs to be able to resolve two things: what to do next and how to do...

In this paper we show that a phenomenon in animal learning theory (the outcome devaluation effect) for which there is dispute over whether explicit representations and symbolic reasoning is required for its performance, does not require such things. This is done using a reactive motivational model, previously inspired from ethological thought, to which some simple reinforcement learning rules are attached. An instantation of the model is used as the control system of an animat in a spatial computer simulation and it succeeds in learning the necessary parameters to allow the behaviour sequencing system to exhibit the phenomenon. 1 Introduction How complex can a reactive animat's behaviours get before some begin to appeal for a return to the well established rational techniques in classical artificial intelligence ? This paper offers an analysis and performance of a phenomenon in animal learning theory that provokes controversy about the type and complexity of the cognitive machinery ...

This paper is complementary to a previous review of signicant research on adaptive behavior in animats. It summarizes the current stateof -the art and outlines directions for possible progress. 1. Introduction In the proceedings of SAB94, we published a review of signicant research on adaptive behavior in animats since the rst SAB conference, held in 1990 (MEYE94). This review summarized the state-of-the art, insofar as the proceedings of three dedicated conferences could help delineate it. Now that three other SAB conferences have been held, we considered that it would be useful to update that earlier review, in order to assess the corresponding progress, to infer the directions in which interesting developments are likely to be expected, and to stress needs for specic additional research eorts. As in the preceding review, this one makes reference only to SAB conference proceedings (SAB96, SAB98, SAB00), on the premise that this perspective, although voluntarily limited, d...

This thesis describes the development of an autonomous robot system that gathers a ock of ducks in a circular arena and manoeuvres them safely to a pre-determined goal position. In the process it establishes a methodology for developing robots that interact with animals. An important feature of this methodology is that it enables the development of a machine that can usefully interact with an animal without using the animal in the design process. Interacting with animals imposes strong constraints of real-time action, robustness and animal safety. A suitable arena, robot vehicle, control architecture and vision system are described. An animal-interactive robot must be robust with respect to the inevitable variations in behaviour between individual animals and even in the same animal over time. It is suggested that (a) animal-interactive robot controllers should exploit the underlying mechanisms of the subject animals' behaviour rather than the details of any particular animal or gro...

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