Behavior-based fuzzy control system for a mobile robot with environment recognition by sensory-motor coordination

Abstract

An idea to form symbolic representations which can be coupled with behavior-based robot systems is introduced. Our behavior-based control system is implemented with Subsumption Architecture (SA), which is a class of behavior-based systems, and the modules of SA are realized with fuzzy control. Our fundamental idea in applying a symbolic environmental model to this behavior-based system is that the categories attached to the symbols are to be extracted from the sensory-motor coordination of the robot. We realized this idea by the use of self-organizing map (SOM) which categorizes behavior sequence of the robot. By categorizing the resulting behaviors, the concept about the categories of the environmental structures, which is embedded in the sensory-motor coordination, can be extracted. In the last part of this paper, we introduce a hybrid system which is composed of a lower-level behavior-based system and a higher-level symbol system, and then is applied to a path-planning problem as a verification of our proposed idea.