Environmental Influences and Intrinsic Dynamics in Adaptive Behavior

Attempts to understand the neural mechanisms underlying animal behavior and attempts to build robots with the versatility and robustness of animals share a great many conceptual challenges. At some level, the challenges faced by all agents operating in the real world exhibit important similarities. This suggests that the biologist seeking to understand the neural mechanisms of animal behavior and the roboticist interested in the construction and control of versatile and robust autonomous robots might have much to learn from one another (Beer et al. 993). Such interactions can take many different forms, from detailed models that attempt to replicate the data on specific neuroethological systems, to abstract models that explore more general issues, to the construction of biologically-based autonomous robots (Maes 1990; Meyer & Wilson 1991; Meyer et al. 1993).