Braitenberg Vehicles

Valentino Braitenberg wrote an interesting book titled "Vehicles: An Exercise in Synthetic Psychology" (an easy read). Taking the vantage point of a psychologist, he extended the principles of analog circuit behavior to a series of gedanken experiments involving the design of a collection of vehicles. These systems used inhibitory and excitatory influences, directly coupling the sensors to the motors. Seemingly complex behavior results from relatively simple sensorimotor transformations. A wide range of vehicles was created including those that were imagined to exhibit cowardice, aggression, and even love. These systems are inflexible custom machines, and are not reprogrammable. Nonetheless, the variability of their overt behavior is compelling. Reactive robotic control has great similarity to this early work.

Your job is to either write a simple simulator, with variable environments that a user can specify, and a set of vehicles that embody at least 3 of these personality traits. Another approach would be to use either the existing missionlab simulation/robot control system that is the mainstay of our lab, or the Javabots behavioral simulation system to demonstrate these systems.