μNAV: a minimalist approach to navigation

Psychologists´ debates on the role of knowledge to control actions in living beings have strongly influenced the research in the field of artificial intelligence and, consequently, of robotics. In both fields a focus of the debate has been the relevance (or even the presence) of a mental/internal representation in driving the course of actions of biological/artificial beings. In this paper we show that even very complex navigation tasks within maze-like environments can be carried out by an agent which needs to store just ´a handful of bytes´ of internal representation about the world in which it is moving. The approach is called micronavigation, since it aims to capture the problem of mobile robot navigation in its entirety but with a minimalist approach.