Abstract
Braitenberg vehicles are a widely used model of animal behaviour in robotics and Artificial Life. This paper presents the first comprehensive and formal analysis of the behaviour of Braitenberg vehicles 2 and 3. After a review of their intuitive behaviour we present their models as dynamical systems, that under circularly symmetric stimuli can be simplified and analysed using the phase plot technique. We prove that intuitive understanding is not enough to determine the potential behaviour of vehicles 2b and 3a and, under certain circumstances, they could behave as vehicles 2a and 3b respectively. This work paves the way to a proper understanding of Braitenberg vehicles, as it provides theoretical support for their many existing empirically grounded works.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Braitenberg, V.: Vehicles. Experiments in synthetic psycology. The MIT Press (1984)
Resnik, M.: LEGO, Logo and Life. In: Artificial Life. Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems, pp. 397–406 (1987)
Travers, M.: Animal construction kits. In: Artificial Life. Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems, pp. 421–442 (1987)
Fraenkel, G.S., Gunn, D.L.: The orientation of animals. Kineses, taxes and compass reactions. Dover Publications (1961)
Boeddeker, N., Egelhaaf, M.: Steering a virtual blowfly: simulation of visual pursuit. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 270, 1971–1978 (2003)
Arechavaleta, G., Laumond, J.P., Hicheur, H., Berthoz, A.: An optimality principle governing human walking. IEEE Transactions on Robotics 24(1), 5–14 (2008)
Rañó, I.: A bio-inspired controller to generate dense wandering workspace trajectories. In: Proceedings of the 7th Simposium on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles (2010)
Rañó, I.: An Empirical Evidence of Braitenberg Vehicle 2b Behaving as a Billiard Ball. In: Doncieux, S., Girard, B., Guillot, A., Hallam, J., Meyer, J.-A., Mouret, J.-B. (eds.) SAB 2010. LNCS, vol. 6226, pp. 293–302. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Rañó, I.: A steering taxis model and the qualitative analysis of its trajectories. Adaptive Behavior 17(3), 197–211 (2009)
Lilienthal, A.J., Duckett, T.: Experimental analysis of gas-sensitive Braitenberg vehicles. Advanced Robotics 18(8), 817–834 (2004)
Bicho, E., Schöner, G.: The dynamic approach to autonomous robotics demonstrated on a low-level vehicle platform. Robotics and Autonomous Systems 21, 23–35 (1997)
Schöner, G., Dose, M., Engels, C.: Dynamics of behavior: theory and applications for autonomous robot architectures. Robotics and Autonomous Systems 16, 213–245 (1995)
Yang, X., Patel, R.V., Moallem, M.: A Fuzzy-Braitenberg Navigation Strategy for Differential Drive Mobile Robots. Journal of Intelligent Robotic Systems 47, 101–124 (2006)
Webb, B.: A Spiking Neuron Controller for Robot Phonotaxis, pp. 3–20. The MIT/AAAI Press (2001)
Mautner, C., Belew, R.K.: Evolving robot morphology and control. Artificial Life and Robotics 4, 130–136 (2000)
Salomon, R.: Evolving and optimizing Braitenberg vehicles by means of evolution strategies. Int. J. Smart Eng. Syst. Design 2, 69–77 (1999)
Kaplan, D., Glass, L.: Understanding Nonlinear Dynamics. Springer (1995)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Rañó, I. (2012). An Introduction to the Analysis of Braitenberg Vehicles 2 and 3 Using Phase Plane Portrait. In: Ziemke, T., Balkenius, C., Hallam, J. (eds) From Animals to Animats 12. SAB 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7426. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33093-3_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33093-3_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33092-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33093-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)