Comment by Animats
17 hours ago
The ancestor is not Braitenberg. It's Grey Walter's turtles.
In 1948, W. Grey Walter built two simple robots that could sense light and touch.[1] Much complex behavior emerged. That's where this idea started.
Watch the video.[2] It's very impressive for 1948 and tube technology. If you've seen an original Roomba, you've seen a similar level of intelligence. Rod Brooks went down this road. But it didn't go very far. There are severe limits to purely reactive robotics. It doesn't work well for anything that moves fast enough that inertia matters.
It’s very odd that Braitenberg didn’t cite Walter’s precedent in ‘Vehicles’. He very likely knew about Walter, Ashby’s homeostat, etc, and used the cybernetics terminology in some of his work.
Fun historical note: the linked newsreel film was known about but unseen for a long time, then found by Owen Holland in the BBC Bristol archive around 1999. Either Owen or I sent it to Rod, to great enjoyment.
Film includes operator-moves-trashcan-with-foot, a staple of mobile robot clips ever since.
See also: https://cyberneticzoo.com/cyberneticanimals/1969-the-logo-tu... In my gifted & talented class in the 80's we were introduced to computers and I remember seeing the picture of "Irving" and thinking "Wow, I should learn LOGO to program robots when I grow up" (unfortunately, recursion scared me so I switched to BASIC and later assembly).
Thank you - also came to comment on Elmer and Elise being the precursor long ago.
Walter himself mentioned the perceived complexity of a simple system to the observer, stating it "might be accepted as evidence of some degree of self-awareness."
Grey Walter also wrote The Living Brain in 1953. It's a fascinating window into the state of brain science and robotics around that time.
The Soviets allegedly used the same principle to make cheap single sensor missile seeker heads.
Two DOF: two sensors?
If the missile is spinning, you can do it with one. The original Sidewinder air to air missile worked that way.
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Came here to say this and delighted to see it!