From bio-inspired vs. psycho-inspired to etho-inspired robots

Artificial intelligence has been roughly divided into two schools of thought since its beginnings, the symbolic (also known as GOFAI, neat, classical, etc.) and the subsymbolic one (connectionist, scruffy, etc.). These two approaches have also had strong influence on the robotics field. In this paper we want to present a less known one, based on Ethology, and its application to the generation of autonomous behavior in mobile robots. In this way, we present the foundations of JDE (Jerarquı́a Dinámica de Esquemas), an etho-inspired architecture where behavior is organized as a dynamic hierarchy of independent schemas, as well as some examples of its applications, and a discussion about its properties. c © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.