The name is absent

BBS often present emergent properties. Emergence in BBS will be discussed in Section
2.1, after we state some notions about complex systems and emergence.

1.3. Some Areas of Application of BBS

BBS may be applied in a wide range of fields. Wherever a control system is needed to
take quick adaptive decisions, a BBS may be used. In the following sections, we will describe
its applications to robotics, software agents, artificial life, and philosophy.

1.3.1. Robotics

“If we consider the (human) body as a machine, we shall conclude that it is much more ordered
that any other; and its movements are more admirable than those of machines invented by man,
because the body has been made by God.”
—Descartes

Robots which have specific functions, like the ones which work in manufacturing plants,
are more or less fully developed. We mean that people have a clear idea of how to build them.
This is because they are rather simple. They are rather “dumb”. But what about mobile
autonomous robots, which develop in a real and dynamic environment, that have many goals
and must take decisions¹⁰? Researchers in AI have been building them for a long time, but they
still do not fulfill all the requirements that are desired in them. But indeed there has been a
great improvement in the design and building of these robots. We can say that the evolution
of robotics is at an insect level. We can successfully imitate an insect’s behaviour (Beer and
Chiel, 1993; Brooks, 1993).

Most researchers began to build robots using knowledge representations (e.g. rules). But
they easily malfunctioned and hardly achieved their goals. Since the properties desired in these
robots were present in animal behaviour, researchers began to model and imitate this
behaviour. This was one of the main reasons of the development of BBS.

Examples of these robots are: Herbert (Connell, 1989), a robot which goal was to collect
empty cans around the MIT Mobot Lab; Periplaneta Computarix (Beer et. al., 1992; Beer and
Chiel, 1993), a robotic cockroach, inspired in the neural circuits of the American cockroach;
Kismet (Breazeal, 1999), a robot for social interactions with humans; and COG (Brooks, 1993),
a humanoid robot capable of restricted communication with humans.

Other applications of these robots include extraterrestrial exploration, where the robots
must have some autonomy, due to the time that a signal from Earth takes to reach the robot.
Also a great deal of research has been put into robots which play soccer, and the organization
of the Robocup has stimulated this research. Robots have been also developed for submarine
exploration, bomb deactivation, and entertainment (i.e. toys).

¹⁰From now on, we will refer to this type of robots just as “robots”.

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