On the difference between plant-controller systems and agent-environment interaction systems

In this paper, I first briefly introduce the basic idea of plant-controller systems. I then show, using some examples of behaviour of quite simple mobile robots, how the sense-model-reason-plan-act architecture of the classical mobile robot is derived from the plant-controller system concept. Following this, I show how the same kind of behaviour can be produced by a mobile robot which uses quite a different kind of architecture, though now quite a familiar one based upon Braitenberg´s (1994) vehicle number 31. I suggest that an extension of this type of architecture can form the basis for a different kind of mobile robot, a kind of agent-environment interaction system, which is now being widely investigated and developed within an approach to intelligent robotics often called `behaviour-based robotics´