Studying robot-environment interaction via transparent controllers

In this paper we address the question of “Why is it that a mobile robot, programmed in a certain way and placed in some environment to execute a program, behaves in the way it does?”. We present three real world experiments in which we first obtain transparent controllers to express sensor-motor couplings of a mobile robot. We then use these models to analyze the robot behaviour formally; in particular to understand how the sensor readings are related to motor commands, to evaluate the derived controllers from a mathematical point of view and even to predict the behaviour of the robot in untested environments.