BraitenbergExperiment

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• Braitenberg Vehicles

Braitenberg Vehicles

Braintenberg vehicles consist of a series of minimal embodied and situated agents of increasing complexity described by Valentino Braitenberg in his very influential book (Braitenberg, 1984). These vehicles are provided with few sensors and motors and with minimal brains realized by simply connecting sensors and motors through wires. Braitenberg vehicles were meant to be through experiments. However, some of them can be easily implemented in physical robots.

The BraitenbergExperiment plugin enables to experiment with Braitenberg vehicles 2 and 3. In particular, thanks to the integrated graphical interface, it enables the user to vary the wiring circuit, the conductivity of the wires, and to immediately observe the resulting behaviour. The documentation included in (Nolfi, 2016, chapter 1) includes a brief overview of Braitenberg work, an explanation of vehicles 2 and 3, and directions on how to use this experiments to gain a practical knowledge on how behaviour emerges from the robot/environmental interaction.

References

Braitenberg, V. (1984). Vehicles. Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Nolfi S. (2016). Adaptive Robots: Exploring the Complex Adaptive System Nature of Behaviuor and Cognition. Roma, Italy: CNR-ISTC.