Machine intelligence grounded in reality

The design, realization, and application of intelligent, autonomous, sensor-driven, behavior-based robotic agents are discussed. The authors have identified four philosophical goals for machine intelligence grounded in reality to flourish: integration, real-world issues, interdisciplinary teamwork, and critical thinking. Building a robot requires that the designer integrates control in electronic and mechanical systems and produces a working device, confronts the user with interactions, between different subsystems, and gives the designer the opportunity to trade off between the different subsystems in constructing an autonomous agent. The environment also encourages biomedical engineers to confront the issues involved in getting a physical agent to operate reliably in a realistic environment by giving them the opportunity to build their own animal, providing a unique perspective on the many problems that nervous systems actually solve.