From mobility to autopoiesis: acquiring environmental information to deliver commands to the effectors

Autonomous robots, like most biological systems, use locomotion as very distinguishing property to dynamically interact and learn about the environment. In the biological context this activity implies some form of intelligence suggesting a similar approach for artificial systems. Recently Asama has coined the term mobiligence referring to the intelligence which emerges through the interaction between an agent and its environment due to its mobility. This kind of intelligence requires abduction, the property by which autonomous agents can import environmental information inside them. The roboticle framework provides a similar property in what it supplies the internal representation of the sensed world by dealing with sensor information as perceptual energy. It feeds the agent governor's unit which delivers effector commands triggered by the so called autopoietic loop. In this perspective, previously assimilated perception is converted into effort by adjusting the direct and inverse gains of the autopoietic loop, balanced by mobility itself.