Braitenberg vehicle

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Vehicle 2a and 2b

The Braitenberg vehicle was originally a hypothetical robot vehicle that was devised in 1984 by the South Tyrolean brain researcher , cyberneticist and writer Valentin Braitenberg for a cybernetic thought experiment . These very simply constructed vehicles are equipped with sensors and can react independently to environmental stimuli . Surprisingly complex behavior can be brought about by astonishingly simple mechanisms .

Although originally designed as thought experiment (Braitenberg speaks of a "walk through a [invented] toy world"), have now been implementations published on the Internet, both as software - simulations as a real and in the form, electronically controlled , mechanical robot.

Software simulation
Lego Braitenberg robot

mechanism

A Braitenberg vehicle is a vehicle equipped with sensors that can move autonomously and is influenced in its movement by environmental stimuli that are registered by the sensors. Although such a vehicle could in principle also be a watercraft, air vehicle or even spacecraft, Braitenberg illustrates his thought experiments with simple little carts traveling on wheels. These have one or two drive wheels at the stern, each with their own motor, and one or more sensors at the bow that can detect different environmental stimuli such as brightness , sound or temperature . The drive wheels are controlled by coupling the actuators (the drive motors) to the sensors, whereby variants of different complexity are considered for this coupling:

  • One sensor can influence several drive motors or only one,
  • the drive motor can be on the same side of the vehicle as the sensor or on the opposite,
  • the influence of the sensor can have an intensifying or inhibiting effect ("inhibitory"),
  • the dependence of the motor on the sensor can be linear or monotonic or follow any mathematical function , and finally can
  • several sensors for different types of stimuli and each with differently designed motor coupling can be combined.

Depending on the variant for the coupling of the sensors and actuators, the result is a more or less complex movement behavior of the vehicle that suggests (possibly targeted) behavior of living beings such as flight or aggression . For this reason, Braitenberg also calls his 14 vehicle types “beings”, and he draws a parallel between the development of his increasingly complex vehicle models and the evolutionary “development of animal species”.

Examples

Vehicle 4a

Essence 2 is equipped with two drive wheels and two brightness sensors. The influence of a sensor on the drive motor assigned to it is monotonically amplifying: with greater brightness the motor rotates faster, with lower brightness it turns more slowly. The essence exists in two variants (see figure above): with essence 2a the sensor acts on the engine on the same side of the vehicle, with essence 2b the leads from the sensors to the engines are crossed.

The two beings show opposing behavior because of the different sensor-actuator coupling: Being 2a seems to fear the light, it evades the light source and only comes to rest in a sufficiently dark environment, being 2b will turn to the light source and in apparently aggressive restlessness heading towards them.

Essence 4a essentially corresponds to the construction of the essence of type 2, but the dependence of the motor on the corresponding sensor is no longer monotonous and linear: the motor power reaches a maximum at a certain stimulus intensity, at stimulus strengths above or below this value it decreases non-linearly . The picture shows the possible behavior of being 4a in the vicinity of one or more stimulus sources.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Braitenberg: Vehikel 2004, p. 10
  2. ↑ Braitenberg: Vehikel 2004, p. 11

literature

(The German first name "Valentin" is sometimes used in the literature listed.)

  • Valentin Braitenberg: Vehicle . Experiments with artificial beings. LIT Verlag, Münster 2004, ISBN 3-8258-7160-6 .
  • Valentin Braitenberg: Artificial beings . Behavior of cybernetic vehicles. Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig / Wiesbaden 1986, ISBN 3-528-08949-0 ( googlecode.com [PDF]).
  • Valentino Braitenberg: Vehicles: Experiments in synthetic psychology . MIT Press , Cambridge 1984, ISBN 0-262-52112-1 (English).
  • Markus Sebastian Müller: The Braitenberg vehicles . Thesis. GRIN Verlag, Norderstedt 2013, ISBN 978-3-638-84349-2 .

Web links

Commons : Braitenberg vehicle  - collection of images, videos and audio files