7 research outputs found
A robot trace maker: modeling the fossil evidence of early invertebrate behavior.
The study of trace fossils, the fossilized remains of animal behavior, reveals interesting parallels with recent research in behavior-based robotics. This article reports robot simulations of the meandering foraging trails left by early invertebrates that demonstrate that such trails can be generated by mechanisms similar to those used for robot wall-following. We conclude with the suggestion that the capacity for intelligent behavior shown by many behavior-based robots is similar to that of animals of the late Precambrian and early Cambrian periods approximately 530 to 565 million years ago
Integrated information increases with fitness in the evolution of animats
One of the hallmarks of biological organisms is their ability to integrate
disparate information sources to optimize their behavior in complex
environments. How this capability can be quantified and related to the
functional complexity of an organism remains a challenging problem, in
particular since organismal functional complexity is not well-defined. We
present here several candidate measures that quantify information and
integration, and study their dependence on fitness as an artificial agent
("animat") evolves over thousands of generations to solve a navigation task in
a simple, simulated environment. We compare the ability of these measures to
predict high fitness with more conventional information-theoretic processing
measures. As the animat adapts by increasing its "fit" to the world,
information integration and processing increase commensurately along the
evolutionary line of descent. We suggest that the correlation of fitness with
information integration and with processing measures implies that high fitness
requires both information processing as well as integration, but that
information integration may be a better measure when the task requires memory.
A correlation of measures of information integration (but also information
processing) and fitness strongly suggests that these measures reflect the
functional complexity of the animat, and that such measures can be used to
quantify functional complexity even in the absence of fitness data.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figures, one supplementary figure. Three supplementary
video files available on request. Version commensurate with published text in
PLoS Comput. Bio
Towards automated joining element design
Product variety and its induced manufacturing complexity remains to increase and therefore greatens challenges for design of joining elements. Historically, joining element design was a paper-based process with incomplete variety documentation and is digitalized only by replacing paper for 3D space. Currently, joining element design remains an ambiguous manual task with limited automation, resulting in long iterative, error prone development trajectories and costly reworks. Thus, processes in practice conflict with required capabilities. Artificial intelligence helps to solve such conflicts by taking over repetitive tasks, preventing human errors, optimizing designs and enabling designers to focus on their core competencies. This paper proposes a novel artificial intelligence method toolbox as a foundation to automate joining element design in manufacturing industries. The methodology aims to incorporate multiple lifecycle requirements including large product variety