Design of robotic behavior that imitates animal consciousness

A 6-degrees-of-freedom serial arm hand is controlled to move toward an object in an unseen environment. We developed a consciousness-based architecture (CBA), which is a hierarchical human development model representing the relationship between consciousness and behavior and is used for imitating a human groping action. During forward motion toward the object, a robot arm hand can help to avoid obstacles from which the robot collects contact information. The CBA organizes such information to learn a path plan for backward motion to the origin without contact with the obstacles. Experimental results show that the CBA successfully extends the hand to the goal while avoiding any obstacle. This work was presented in part at the 12th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 25–27, 2007