Despite showcasing Braitenberg vehicles, this book provides a departure from the traditional work of Braitenberg (1984) in a number of important ways. Whereas Braitenberg relied on an anthropomorphized toy model that mimics complex behaviors, this work focuses on the geometry of dynamical pairwise physical interactions between agents. Hotton and Yoshimi’s approach focuses on open dynamical systems, which provides us with two state spaces to evaluate vehicle behavior: the agent state and the agent’s environmental state. The input–output relations of a Braitenberg vehicle pair demonstrate these open dynamics: The output of one vehicle is related to the input of the other vehicle. This produces not only a continuous feedback loop but also interactions that produce the fundamental elements of emergent behaviors seen in swarming and flocking models (Calvao & Brigatti, 2014). Phenomenologically, these are not social interactions per se but are related to the literature on coupled dynamical...

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