Engineering approach to building complete, intelligent beings

Rather than tackle isolated aspects of Rather than tackle isolated aspects of human-level intelligence the mobile robot group at MIT has been working bottom up trying to build complete insect-level intelligent systems for mobile robots. The robots are situated in ordinary people-populated office and laboratory areas and must go about their business in an unstructured dynamically changing environment. Traditional AI techniques make such unrealistic assumptions on the perceptual and actuation systems that they are not much use for such an endeavour. We have developed a different approach, based on task achieving behaviors, rather than information processing components, as the fundamental unit of reduction of a complete intelligent system. We have built a series of complete creatures (Allen, Herbert, Tom and Jerry, Genghis, and now Seymour under construction) which exist in and interact with the world.