Distributed action selection by a brainstem neural substrate: an embodied evaluation

  • Authors:

  • Mark Humphries;Tony Prescott

  • Affiliations:

  • Adaptive Behaviour Research Group, Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, UK;Adaptive Behaviour Research Group, Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, UK

  • Venue:
  • SAB'06 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on From Animals to Animats: simulation of Adaptive Behavior
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Theoretical approaches to the problem of action selection in autonomous agents often contrast centralised and distributed selection schemes Here we describe a neural substrate for distributed action selection in the vertebrate brain-stem, the medial reticular formation (mRF), which may form a evolutionary precursor to centralised schemes found in the higher brain We evaluate its competence as a selection device for robot control in a simulated resource co-ordination task, and use a genetic algorithm to evolve the mRF's inputs and internal structure Some configurations of the mRF could sufficiently co-ordinate actions to maximise the robot's energy, but this is critically dependent on a high rate of energy acquisition, which leaves an animal (or agent) susceptible to food shortages Thus, the inflexibility of the mRF as a distributed selection mechanism may have provided impetus for the evolution of more complex, centralised, selection mechanisms in the brain.