Autonomous robots and emergent behavior: a set of primitive behaviors for mobile robot control

In order for a robot to act autonomously over a wide range of tasks and environments, it must be capable of exhibiting a variety of different behaviors. In this paper, the authors examine different types of behavioral patterns that can exist for a mobile robot when one is limited to constructing such behavior from computational devices which contain no internal state. They construct a set of primitive reflexive behaviors, each of which causes the robot to exhibit a specific behavioral pattern in response to external and/or internal stimuli. Each primitive behavior models a simple form of reflex behavior. In addition, they discuss how each primitive reflexive behavior results in motion of the robot, illustrate different types of primitive reflexive behaviors, and provide graphic representations of the resulting behavioral patterns.<>