Internal robotics

Robotics can contribute significantly to our understanding of the behaviour of organisms because of its emphasis on the role of the body and its physical interactions with the external environment in determining the organism’s behaviour. However, behaviour is the result of the interactions of an organism’s nervous system with both the external environment and the internal environment, i.e. with what lies within the organism’s body. While robotics has concentrated so far on the first type of interactions (external robotics), to more adequately understand the behaviour of organisms we also need to reproduce in robots the inside of the body of organisms and to study the interactions of the robot’s control system with what is inside the body (internal robotics). The paper discusses seven differences between the two types of interactions and briefly describes some examples of internal robotics: robots which evolve a biological clock that allows them to look for food during the day and to rest at night, robots which evolve a pain signal associated with some damage in their body which allows the robot to stop moving when ill in order to recover more quickly from the bodily damage, and robots which can be hungry and/or thirsty and respond adaptively or maladaptively to conflicts between these two motivations.