An Investigation into Obstacle Avoidance as an ‘Emergent’ Behaviour from two Different Perspectives

In this paper, we investigate in which ways a particular behaviour can be achieved with simple mechanisms without being explicitly encoded. It is suggested that enrichening the overall behaviour of an agent in such a way simplifies the creation of intelligent agents. We focus on obstacle avoidance as one particular kind of such a behaviour by an agent. We demonstrate that obstacle avoidance can be achieved on both a strategic level, caused by the intrinsic structure of the environment, and on a morphological level, caused by the properties of the agent’s body. The underlying principles are studied on the example of local visual homing and an agent without sensory-motor coupling.