Description of Hormonal Activation for Subsumption
`Hormonal' Activation strategy for Subsumption Agents
By designing robots with a number of behaviors, the subsumption
architecture must support
the ability to decide which behaviors are appropriate at a given time and,
from these, which one should be selected.
Brooks [1991] describes a system
of activation which is
modeled upon animal hormone systems.
In this system, some of the
augmented finite state machines of the basic
subsumption architecture layers can halted or inhibited by the presence
or absence of a hormone. This computational mechanism is designed
to modulate the agent's behavior by thresholding the layers of AFSMs and
preventing the activity of those levels below the threshold.
The hormonal mechanism leads to integration of many
of the
behaviors
described for the subsumption architecture.
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