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From: iaf@ely.cl.cam.ac.uk (Innes Ferguson)
Newsgroups: comp.robotics
Subject: Re: Behavior Oriented Robotics
Message-ID: <1991Mar11.183804.17109@cl.cam.ac.uk>
Date: 11 Mar 91 18:38:04 GMT
References: <1991Mar6.203102.17682@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Sender: news@cl.cam.ac.uk (The news facility)
Organization: Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
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I haven't seen the Discover article you mention, but I'm guessing
it refers to work done by Brooks et al. at MIT. If this is so, then
as a good starting point I would recommend "A Robust Layered Control System
for a Mobile Robot" (R.A. Brooks, IEEE J of RA, 2(1), 1986). As a followup
I suggest reading Robotics and Autonomous Systems 6(1&2), 1990. The latter
is a special issue on Designing Autonomous Agents (Pattie Maes, guest
editor) and reviews work related/similar to behaviour-oriented robots (e.g.
reactive and situated action agents, computational neuroethology, etc.).

I would also recommend a couple of articles in Artificial Intelligence
47, 1991. The first is by Brooks - "Intelligence without representation" -
and the second is by David Kirsh - "Today the earwig, tomorrow man?"
Kirsh's article is a response to Brooks' claim that conceptual
representation is unnecessary for designing agents capable of "intelligent"
behaviour.

IMHO, Brooks' ideas are important as he is suggesting a very different
approach to creating artificial intelligence from the more traditional
(symbolic, high-level, inference-driven) approach. However, I think his
stance is somewhat extreme and I doubt very much whether his subsumption
architecture can be scaled up to deal with such tasks as predicting
other robots'/agents' intentions, learning, reconciling local and global
constraints on a robot's own (multiple) goals, problem solving, language
understanding, etc. _without_ resorting to explicit representations, 
inference (incl. default reasoning), or some run-time decision making
procedure.
I guess time will tell.

Regards... Innes


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Innes A. Ferguson          Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge,
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