Complex behaviours through modulation in autonomous robot control

Abstract

Combining previous experience and knowledge to contemplate tasks of increasing complexity is one of the most interesting problems in autonomous robotics. Here we present an ANN based modular architecture that uses the concept of modulation to increase the possibilities of reusing previously obtained modules. A first approximation to the modulation of the actuators was tested in a previous paper where we showed how it was useful to obtain more complex behaviours that those obtained using only activation / inhibition. In this paper we extend the concept to sensor modulation, which enables the architecture to easily modify the required behaviour for a module, we show how both types of modulation can be used at the same time and how the activation / inhibition can be seen as a particular case of modulation. Some examples in a real robot illustrate the capabilities of the whole architecture. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.