A Finer-Grained Motivational Model of Behaviour Sequencing

In this paper we consider three points. 1) Etho-logical behaviour models are not grounded in exhibited behaviour-the models have not been developed far enough, indeed, work in the ani-mat community may help ethology; 2) In order to assess agent performance we should try to develop a functional account of behaviour whilst developing a mechanistic account; 3) Planning and reasoning is not necessary to exhibit sophisticated appetitive behaviour sequences. To illustrate these points, our model of behaviour selection in a self-suucient autonomous agent is based on an ethological motivation model which extends traditional ethological modelling in the direction of implementable behaviours. The model is rstly justiied from a functional approach and then tested and shown to have improved performance in a two-dimensional continuous simulated environment. It is noted that the model exhibits what could be described as planning behaviour.

[1]  M. Cabanac.  Pleasure: the common currency. , 1992, Journal of theoretical biology.

[2]  G. Baerends.  The functional organization of behaviour , 1976, Animal Behaviour.

[3]  Barbara Webb,et al.  Robotic experiments in cricket phonotaxis , 1994 .

[4]  R. Sibly,et al.  On the Fitness of Behavior Sequences , 1976, The American Naturalist.

[5]  Robin I. M. Dunbar.  Quantitative Ethology: The State Space Approach, D.J. McFarland, A. Houston. Pitman Books, London (1981), 204, Price £17.50 , 1983 .

[6]  D J McFarland,et al.  The behavioural final common path. , 1975, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences.

[7]  Rodney A. Brooks,et al.  Elephants don't play chess , 1990, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[8]  F. Toates.  Animal behaviour: A systems approach , 1980 .

[9]  A. Ludlow.  The Behaviour of a Model Animal , 1976 .

[11]  T. Georgian,et al.  A model of seston capture by net-spinning caddisflies , 1981 .

[12]  Spier,et al.  Possibly optimal decision-making under self-sufficiency and autonomy , 1997, Journal of theoretical biology.

[13]  J. R. P. Halperin,et al.  Machine motivation , 1991 .

[14]  Bruce Blumberg,et al.  Action-selection in hamsterdam: lessons from ethology , 1994 .

[15]  David Chapman,et al.  Pengi: An Implementation of a Theory of Activity , 1987, AAAI.

[16]  R. Sibly.  How incentive and deficit determine feeding tendency , 1975, Animal Behaviour.

[17]  Toby Tyrell,et al.  The use of hierarchies for action selection , 1993 .

[18]  Pattie Maes,et al.  Situated agents can have goals , 1990, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[19]  J. K. Rosenblatt,et al.  A fine-grained alternative to the subsumption architecture for mobile robot control , 1989, International 1989 Joint Conference on Neural Networks.

[20]  R. McCleery,et al.  On satiation curves , 1977, Animal Behaviour.

[21]  William Rowan,et al.  The Study of Instinct , 1953 .

[22]  A. Dixit.  Optimization in Economic Theory , 1976 .

[23]  Toby Tyrrell,et al.  Computational mechanisms for action selection , 1993 .

[24]  Stewart W. Wilson.  The animat path to AI , 1991 .

[25]  D. McFarland,et al.  Intelligent behavior in animals and robots , 1993 .

[26]  Stanley J. Rosenschein,et al.  From Animals to Animats: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior , 1996 .