Toward a benchmarking framework for research into bio-inspired hardware-software artefacts

In this paper, we suggest that one of the more crucial tasks currently facing researchers into the field of autonomous mobile robotics is the provision of a common task, or set of tasks, as a means of evaluating different approaches to robot design and architecture, and the generation of a common set of experimental frameworks to facilitate these different approaches. This paper stars with a brief introduction to the field, and behavior-based control in particular. We then discuss the issue of animal versus robot behavior, and focus on simulated experimentation versus embodied robotics. Finally, we move to the feasibility of evaluating and benchmarking different architectures, with the aim of producing mobile robots of continuously higher utility, with specific reference to our current four-layered robot control architecture. This work was presented in part at the Fifth International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 26–28, 2000