Issues in the Physical Realisation of Autonomous Robotic Agents.

The paper reports on the design and physical implementation of a non-trivial, biologically motivated experiment with robotic agents operating in a physical ecosystem. It focuses on the agent architecture, which is behavior-oriented and dynamics-oriented. Data from physical experiments illustrate the paper. 1 Introduction It is well known that the transition from simulation to physical implementation of robotic agent experiments is a non-trivial exercise. One of the recurrent themes in the literature is that the gap between simulation and physical realisation is so wide that results from simulation do not carry over at all to physical realisation [1]. Others have argued that the gap is not so wide and that results obtained in simulated environments (including results from experiments in deriving behavioral networks through genetic algorithms) can be relatively easily ported to physical robots [4]. In the past years, we have been working on the implementation of a non-trivial experimen..