Dynamical systems for the behavioral organization of autonomous robot navigation

We present an architecture for the behavioral organization of autonomous robots. For the example of navigation, we describe how complex behavior can be broken up into multiple elementary behaviors. The overall behavior is generated by activating and deactivating the elementary behaviors dependent on both the sensor input and the intrinsic logics of the behavioral plan needed to fulfill the task. The elementary behaviors as well as their organization into behavioral sequences are achieved by appropriately designed nonlinear dynamical systems. We show how intrinsicly discrete functionalities like counting and decision making can be realized by nonlinear dynamical systems and how these dynamics can be coupled stably and flexibly.