Navigation: animals as autonomous robots

Intelligent systems that mimic animal behavior — animats — have attracted increasing attention recent years. The animat described in this chapter uses a two-dimensional diffusion-based navigation algorithm to carry out complex spatial-navigation tasks: multiple target finding, barrier-detour and maze learning. From a matrix of targets, the animat generates a discrete (in time and space) diffusion surface. This surface is used to select the next move through a local hill-climbing process. The system can control an indefinite number of animats and has been proposed as a guidance scheme for the efficient identification of suspected land mines.

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