Technical Opinion: From Animal Behaviour to Autonomous Robots

TL;DR

This paper reviews how animal behavior insights can inform the development of autonomous robots, highlighting current techniques and future research directions for operating in complex real-world environments.

Contribution

It provides a concise overview of animal-inspired approaches to robot autonomy and suggests new research avenues based on biological models.

Findings

Animal behavior models inform robot autonomy strategies

Current techniques leverage biological principles for autonomy

Future research directions include more bio-inspired algorithms

Abstract

With the rising applications of robots in unstructured real-world environments, roboticists are increasingly concerned with the problems posed by the complexity of such environments. One solution to these problems is robot autonomy. Since nature has already solved the problem of autonomy it can be a suitable model for developing autonomous robots. This paper presents a concise review on robot autonomy from the perspective of animal behaviour. It examines some state-of-the-art techniques as well as suggesting possible research directions.