Ecological Robotics: A Schema-Theoretic Approach

Little emphasis to date has been placed on this ecological approach within mobile robotics research, although some related research has been conducted in the recent past in tile context of the artificial life community. All too often, however, these approaches lack both a strong biological basis for their working assumptions and any formal underpinnings (neural, behavioral, and computational) for the results they obtain. We address these problems directly using schema theory and neurophysiological and ethological models to provide credible, generalizable, and useful results in this domain. These systems are currently grounded in robotic simulations and ultimately in actual robotic hardware.