Braitenberg Vehicles

A few years ago, Richard Watson and I built some miniature robots based on the concepts of Valentino Braitenberg, as espoused in his book "Vehicles: Experiements in Synthetic Psychology". Braitenberg's proposal was to build robots with very little purposeful intelligence and limited or no algorithms, with actuation mapped to simple sensor inputs. The resulting actions of the robots appear to an observer as complex behaviors, such as fear, aggression, and love.

We equipped the robots and their environments with optical sensors and LED's. Next, we took long exposures of the robots in action; the resulting images illustrated interesting patterns in behavior.