Complex tasks and control strategies of robots

The robot moves in a simplified world and performs tasks of increasing complexity, such as the exploration of a maze, the recovery of its structure and the planning of some nearly optimal trajectories through the maze. There are three layers of robot motion control: the lowest layer is essentially an optomotor reflex; the second layer has a short term memory and operates when the visual information is not complete; the third layer has a long term memory and reasoning capabilities. The vision and motor systems are assumed to be finite state automata and the control architecture is based on transitions between states of these automata. The intelligent behavior of the robot is primarily caused by the memory and the capability to create simple and useful representations of the world