Neural Systems for Integrating Robot Behaviours

This paper compares and contrasts two approaches to integrating robot behaviours. Robot behaviours can be produced using neural networks, as illustrated by Braitenberg’s vehicles [Braitenberg, 1984]. Experiments show that homogeneous integration is flawed with a behaviour stability problem and with a scalability problem that makes it difficult to use for large scale, complicated control problems. In contrast it is shown that competitive integration leads to incremental design and avoids stability and scalability problems. The experiments are conducted in a maze environment using a real robot.