On the Formal Development of Behavioral Reactive Agents: A Systematic Braitenberg-Vehicle Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a systematic process for developing reactive agents that can exhibit complex behaviors by deriving high-level actions from low-level perceptions, demonstrated through enhanced Braitenberg vehicles.

Contribution

It presents a novel method for engineering reactive agents with high-level cognitive behaviors from perceptual data, using an extended Braitenberg vehicle framework.

Findings

Efficient development process verified through simulations.

Enhanced Braitenberg vehicles with diverse perception-action capabilities.

High-level behaviors successfully derived from low-level perceptions.

Abstract

In this paper, a novel process has been developed to realize high-level complex cognitive behaviors into reactive agents, efficiently. This method paves the way for deducting high-level reactive behaviors from low-level perceptive information by autonomous robots. The aforementioned process lets us actualize different generations of Braitenberg vehicles, are which able to mimic desired behaviors to survive in complex environments with high degrees of flexibility in perception and emergence of high-level cognitive actions. The approach has been used to engineer a Braitenberg vehicle with a wide range of perception-action capabilities. Verification would be realized within this framework, due to the efficient traceability between each sequential pair of process phases. The applied simulations demonstrate the efficiency of the established development process, based on the Braitenberg vehicle's behavior.