Lukasiewicz’ Insect: Continuous-Valued Robotic Control After Ten Years
Jonathan W. Mills, Tony Walker and Bryce Himebaugh
Realizing a colony of insect-like robots presents numerous problems. A brief report on our experiments over the past ten years describes our failures. A view of ant colonies as “storage batteries” illustrates the difficulties. New approaches to continuous-valued robotic control have emerged out of our study of Lukasiewicz logic and Rubel’s Extended Analog Computer. One novel method is that of a visually-proprioceptic robot with a controller based on a 30-year old analog subsumption architecture originated by McCulloch, Kilmer and Blum. The proposed robot continuously looks at itself within its environment, selects behavioral modes accordingly, and learns from what it sees. Such a controller is too complex to be designed. It must be evolved.