An immunological approach to dynamic behavior control for autonomous mobile robots

Abstract

Conventional AI technology has been criticized on many grounds such as brittleness under dynamically changing environments. To overcome this problem, other approaches called new AI, emergent computation, animat approach, behavior-based AI and so on were proposed and confirmed their usefulness. On the other hand, biological information processing systems have many interesting functions and are expected to provide various feasible ideas to engineering fields, especially robotics. Immune system plays important roles to maintain its own system against dynamically changing environments. Therefore, we believe that immune system would provide a new paradigm suitable for dynamic problem dealing with unknown environments rather than static problem. In this paper, we propose a new approach to behavior-based AI by paying attention to biological immune system. We confirm the feasibility of our proposed method by applying to a behavior control of an autonomous mobile robot in cluttered environment as a practical example.