A study on autonomous animated robots: Anibots

In this paper, we demonstrate a design of autonomous virtual creatures (called animated robots: Anibots in this paper) and develop a design tool for animated robots. An animated robot can behave autonomously by using its own sensors and controllers on three-dimensional physically modeled environment. The developed tool can enable us to execute the simulation of Anibots on physical environment at any time during the modeling process. In order to simulate more realistic world, an approximate fluid environment model with low computational costs is presented. It is shown that a combinatorial use of neural network implementation for controllers and the genetic algorithm (GA) or the particle swarm optimization (PSO) is effective for emerging more realistic autonomous behaviours of animated robots.