This is a superbly written text which provides a well illustrated and easy to understand view of behaviour‐based robotics, without reducing its academic appeal. It is suitable for undergraduate and graduate students and researchers studying AI and robotics.
Chapter 1, “Whence behaviour”, discusses what intelligent robots are, their historical development and introduces the wide spectrum of robot control methods. Chapters 2 and 3 address animal and robot behaviour, respectively. The questions “what does animal behaviour offer robotics?” and “what are robotic behaviours?” are answered and examples of bio‐robots and behaviour encoding are given.
“Based‐based architectures” are presented in chapter 4 which includes coverage of subsumption architecture, motor schemas, architectural design issues and other architectures. Chapter 5 discusses “Representational issues for behavioural systems”, and chapter 6 discusses “Hybrid deliberative/reactive architectures”. Subjects covered in this chapter include biological evidence in support of hybrid systems, traditional deliberative planners, layering, and representing hybrid architectures. The “Perceptual basis for behaviour‐based control” is presented in chapter 7.
“Adaptive behaviour” is addressed in chapter 8 and discusses “why should robots learn?”, opportunities in behaviour‐based robotics, learning with neural networks and genetic algorithms, and fuzzy behavioural control. The penultimate chapter of the book presents “Social behaviour”, an analysis of the characterisation of social behaviour, and the social organisation and structure of multiple robots.
Chapter 10 concludes this excellent book with “Fringe robotics: beyond behaviour”, a discussion of the issues of the robot mind, the robot body, and equivalence.
