Behavior-based robotics

Behavior based robotics is about building robots without an internal model of their environment. There is no programming in of what a chair looks like, or what kind of surface they're moving on - all their information is gleaned from the input of their own sensors which in turn is used to create a reaction to the changes in their environment.

Behavior based robotics (BBR for short) shows more biological actions than their computing-intensive counterparts which are very deliberate in their actions. A BBR robot often makes mistakes, repeats actions, and looks confused, but also can show the anthropormophic quality of tenacity. Comparisons between BBRs and insects are frequent because of these actions.

The breakthrough for BBR came in the 80's with the work done at MIT by Professor Rodney Brooks. He built a pair of ground-breaking walking robots (Attila and Ghenghis) that learned to walk based on the feedback they received from their own sensors.

Even earlier than Brooks is Walter Grey Walter, who built a pair of vacuum tube based robots in the 1950's.

Valentino Braitenberg wrote a book called "Vehicles - Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" in 1984 (MIT Press). He describes a series of thought experiments showing how simply wired sensor/motor connections can result in some complex-appearing behaviors.

Some of the latest work in BBR is from the BEAM robotics community who have built upon the work of Mark Tilden. Tilden was inspired by the reduction in the computational power needed for walking mechanisms from Brooks' experiments, and further reduced the computational requirements to that of logic chips, transistor-based electronics, and analog circuit design.