@phdthesis{thesis-bustos,
abstract = {The goal of this dissertation is to study the relationship among autonomy, intelligent behavior and the perception of space in autonomous agents. These three factors are usually explored from quite different perspectives, but their relationship is so deep that a conceptual structure joining them must exist. Efforts aimed at developing intelligent robots that have adopted the main paradigms: Cognitivism and Behavior-Based Artificial Intelligence, have not offered the expected results. However, two new approaches are exploring the middle land in an effort to recover, from a new perspective, the insights developed during the last forty years. On one side, Hybrid Architectures try to soften the interface between reactive behavior and deliberative reasoning, through increasingly dense bidirectional information flows. From a different departure point, Dynamical Systems Theory is beginning to be applied to a wide variety of problems related to Artificial Intelligence, which have been traditionally approached from a straightforward computational point of view. This work is an effort is this last direction. Here, we face the problem of spatial perception in autonomous agents from two complementary viewpoints: the development of a conceptual model that is able to explain desirable properties and facts, inspired in animal and human perception; and the experimental validation of basic aspects of the model on a mobile robot built for this purpose. The proposed model is called perceptual space and consists of a dynamical structure -its state evolves with time- that interacts with specific processing modules: the visual module and the motor module. This structure is organized in three levels: the inner space, which keeps an updated copy of the kinematics, dynamics and propioceptive state of the agent; the outer space, where direct perception of proximal environment is carried out; and extended space, whose recursive encapsulated structure keeps, coded and ordered, unbound amounts of spatial information. The inner dynamics of the perceptual space try to continuously reach an equilibrium point, while it is perturbed by inputs from visual and motor modules. The outcome of this interaction becomes, simultaneously, behavior and representation. The robot used in the experimental research is a mobile tank-like platform endowed with a vision head. It uses a modular control architecture that connects to the main computer on board. All the processing is carried out on board and, at the same time, it can comun{\'{i}}cate with remote workstations through an Ethernet network.},
author = {Bustos García, Pablo},
keywords = {autonomous robots},
pages = {176},
school = {Universidad Politécnica de Madrid},
title = {{Generaci{\'{o}}n de Comportamiento Complejo en Robots Aut{\'{o}}nomos}},
type = {PhD},
year = {1998},
note = {Advisor: Guinea Díaz, Domingo},
journal = {Tesis Doctoral},
publisher = {Universidad Politécnica de Madrid}
}