University of Hertfordshire COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM presents "RELATING BEHAVIOUR SELECTION ARCHITECTURES TO ENVIRONMENTAL COMPLEXITY (or: Try this to Get Your Robots to do the Right Thing)" Speaker: Dr. Lola Caņamero Adaptive Systems Research Group University of Hertfordshire 13 March 2002 (Wednesday) Lecture Theatre LC108 3 - 4 pm Coffee/tea and biscuits will be available. Everyone is Welcome! Abstract: Autonomous agents (animals or robots) must be able to make their own decisions to act in the environment in which they are situated. In the Adaptive Behavior community, this problem is known as Behavior (or Action) Selection: "doing the right thing" in order to satisfy current goals in a particular situation so that survival is guaranteed. There is no single solution to this complex problem, and different mechanisms (behavior selection architectures) will be more or less adequate solutions for different types of environments. In this talk I will present an initial study comparing four variants of a behavior selection architecture in different worlds with varying degrees and types of complexity (amount of objects, availability of resources, and dynamism). The indicators used to measure and compare performance center around the notion of survival ("how well" life is preserved), and results have been analyzed trying to relate how architectural features deal with different aspects of the environment. This study has been performed using Khepera robots inhabiting a typical behavior selection environment created with the Webots simulator. The talk will be followed by a demo of the system. (This is joint work with Orlando Avila-Garcia and Elena Hafner) Colloquium Abstracts On-line: http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/colloq/