Page 187 - Robots Androids and Animatrons : 12 Incredible Projects You Can Build

as strikingly intelligent behavior as in the intelligent photovore
robot discussed later.
For the time being, I will use the name “behavioral-based” to de-
scribe this stimulus-response mechanism. The behavioral-based
approach is one of the two main approaches to implementing intelli-
gence in robots as discussed in Chap. 6. One approach is called “top-
down intelligence” and the other is called “bottom-up intelligence.”
To implement intelligent control functions in a mobile robot [by
using the term “functions” I am limiting the field of discussion to the
movement (mobility) and exploration of an environment for sim-
plicity, but this is by no means a real restriction on either approach
discussed], one must decide on which approach is better to accom-
plish the task. The top-down approach attempts to create an expert
system or program to perform a controlled search and discover. The
bottom-up approach creates “artificial” behavior in the robot and
then causes it to explore and discover.

At first glance you may not see much of a difference in either ap-
proach, but there is one and it’s quite significant. If the expert sys-
tem approaches a situation (or terrain) it hasn’t been
programmed to handle, it will falter. The behavior system on the
166 other hand isn’t looking for any template “programmed” situation to

calculate procedures and couldn’t care less about the situation; it
just goes on exploring.

Robotists have found over the last 30 years of experimentation
that bottom-up programming (behavioral-based) is successful
many times where top-down programming fails.

Robotics pioneer

As previously stated, one of the first pioneers in the bottom-up
approach to robotics was William Grey Walter. He was born in
Kansas City, Missouri, in 1910. When he was 5 years old, his family
moved to England. He attended school there, graduating from King’s
College, Cambridge, in 1931. After graduation, he began doing basic
neurophysiological research in hospitals.

Early in his career, Walter found interest in the work of the Russian
psychologist Ivan Pavlov, famous for his stimulus-response experi-
ment with dogs. In the experiment, Pavlov rang a bell just before
providing food for his dog subjects. After a while, the dogs became
conditioned to salivate just by hearing the bell.

Team LRN
Chapter eight