A Constructivist Approach To Autonomous Systems

When dealing with autonomous robots, the definition of the term “autonomy” is important. Autonomy implies internally an organisation of self-contained and self-referential processes. In this paper, we are dealing with the methodological impact of considering what the robot can actually know. In this context, the idea of combining reactive behaviours with goaloriented mechanisms and of using representations to do the latter remains valid but has to be reformulated. First, we distinguish the internal sensory-motor processes from the behaviours produced when the formers are interacting with an environment. Second, a representation cannot be a representation of an external world, inaccessible to the robot anyway, but only of the interaction history as perceived by the robot itself. In this contribution, we propose such a representation as a graph encoding of the interaction history and show its usages for interpreting, structuring and planning without having to refer to any external environment.