Editing Behavior-based robotics (section)

== History ==

The school of behavior-based robots owes much to work undertaken in the 1980s at the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] by [[Rodney Brooks]], who with students and colleagues built a series of wheeled and legged robots utilizing the [[subsumption architecture]]. Brooks' papers, often written with lighthearted titles such as "''Planning is just a way of avoiding figuring out what to do next''", the [[anthropomorphic]] qualities of his robots, and the relatively low cost of developing such robots, popularized the behavior-based approach.

Brooks' work builds—whether by accident or not—on two prior milestones in the behavior-based approach. In the 1950s, [[William Grey Walter|W. Grey Walter]], an English scientist with a background in [[neurology|neurological]] research, built a pair of [[vacuum tube]]-based robots that were exhibited at the 1951 [[Festival of Britain]], and which have simple but effective behavior-based control systems.

The second milestone is [[Valentino Braitenberg|Valentino Braitenberg's]] 1984 book, "''Vehicles – Experiments in Synthetic Psychology''" (MIT Press). He describes a series of thought experiments demonstrating how simply wired sensor/motor connections can result in some complex-appearing behaviors such as fear and love.

Later work in BBR is from the [[BEAM robotics]] community, which has built upon the work of [[Mark Tilden]]. Tilden was inspired by the reduction in the computational power needed for walking mechanisms from Brooks' experiments (which used one [[microcontroller]] for each leg), and further reduced the computational requirements to that of [[logic]] chips, [[transistor]]-based [[electronics]], and analog [[electrical network|circuit]] design.

A different direction of development includes extensions of behavior-based robotics to multi-robot teams.<ref>{{cite journal |doi=10.1163/156855396X00228 |title=On the design of behavior-based multi-robot teams |year=1995 |last1=Parker |first1=Lynne E.|author1-link=Lynne Parker |journal=Advanced Robotics |volume=10 |issue=6 |pages=547–78|citeseerx=10.1.1.14.5759 }}</ref> The focus in this work is on developing simple generic mechanisms that result in coordinated group behavior, either implicitly or explicitly.