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Exercise 3.10 3 Biological Foundations of the Reactive Paradigm
Describe how cancellation could happen as a result of concurrency and incomplete
FSA.

Exercise 3.11 [Advanced Reading]
Read the first four chapters in Braitenberg’s Vehicles. 25 Write a 2-5 page paper:

a. List and describe the principles of behaviors for robotics in Ch. 3.
b. Discuss how Vehicles is consistent with the biological foundations of reactivity. Be
specific, citing which vehicle illustrates what principle or attribute discussed in
the book.
c. Discuss any flaws in the reasoning or inconsistency between Vehicles with the bio-
logical foundations of reactivity or computer science.

Exercise 3.12 [Advanced Reading]
Read “Sensorimotor transformations in the worlds of frogs and robots,” by Arbib and
Liaw. 7

a. List and describe how the principles of schema theory and potential fields for ro-
botics giveninCh. 3.
b. Summarize the main contributions of the paper.

3.9 End Notes

For the roboticist’s bookshelf.
Valentino Braitenberg’s Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology 25 is the cult clas-
sic of AI roboticists everywhere. It doesn’t require any hardware or programming
experience, just a couple hours of time and an average imagination to experience this
radical departure from the mainstream robotics of the 1970’s.

About David Marr.
David Marr’s idea of a computational theory was an offshoot of his work bridging
the gap between vision from a neurophysiological perspective (his) and computer
vision. As is discussed in his book, Vision, 88 Marr had come from England to work in
the MIT AI lab on computer vision. The book represented his three years there, and
he finished it while literally on his deathbed with leukemia. His preface to the book
is heartbreaking.

A Brief History of Cognitive Science.
Howard Gardner’s The Mind’s New Science 56 gives a nice readable overview of cogni-
tive psychology. He conveys a bit of the controversy Gibson’s work caused.