Artificial Autonomy in the Natural World: Building a Robot Predator

With a few exceptions, today's mobile robots, however complex, are not truly autonomous. At some time, they all require humans to supply them with energy and/or information; most also require other forms of assistance. In complete contrast, even the simplest animals are totally self-sufficient. We describe a current project which aims to construct autonomous robots with animal-like self-sufficiency both in terms of energy and information. The robots will live free on agricultural land, hunting and catching slugs, and fermenting the corpses to produce biogas, which will fuel the generator providing the robots with power.