Sufficient Neurocontrollers can be Surprisingly Simple

Behaviors such as exploration and homing, that seemingly demand a complex control system, only require a perceptron that connects a robot’s sensors to its motors. This is shown by evolving such neurocontrollers for the Khepera robot. An exploitation of the robot’s perception of the environment’s geometrical shape allows the robot to encode time, even though explicitly it is not presented with the time and there are no recurrent connections in the neurocontroller. In a biological context, the robotics approach to show sufficient requirements for obtaining specific behaviors suggest that some biological experiments have to be re-done in order for the conclusions drawn from these biological experiments to be