Trabajo presentado a la 3rd International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB), celebrada en Brighton (Inglaterra) del 8 al 12 de 1994.The paper documents a case study in the design and implementation of a robotic multi-agent system. It illustrates known design guidelines, namely that the physics of the environment must be exploited, that behavior is the result from the interaction dynamics between the agent and the environment, and that emergent behavior can and must be utilised whenever possible. But the case study also challenges certain views, such as the subsumption architecture, the need for an action selection mechanism, the goal-oriented design methodology dominating the literature on planning, and the algorithmic style of writing control programs. Alternatives are explored in the form of a cooperative, parallel, behavior-oriented design.Research has been funded by the ESPRIT basic research project SUBSYM particularly some of the early hardware development, and by the Belgian Government IUAP Centre of Excellence grant to the VUB AI lab.N
