

In this chapter we look at a famous kind of agent, the Braitenberg vehicles, named after their inventor, neuroscientist Valentino Braitenberg. Braitenberg vehicles are ideally suited for illustrating some fundamental theoretical points, such as the frame-ofreference problem. They also provide an interesting perspective on the problems of behavior segmentation and action selection. Moreover, the principles employed by Braitenberg vehicles have been extended to address the design of autonomous agents in general. Not surprisingly, this approach is called Extended Braitenberg Architecture (EBA). Braitenberg vehicles are instantiations of a synthetic methodology. Braitenberg proposed studying principles of intelligence by building successively more complex agents. The original Braitenberg vehicles were meant to be thought experiments. However, some of them can easily be implemented in physical robots, and we will discussed one such example, the "timid" vehicle, in this chapter. After a short discussion of Braitenberg's motivation, his vehicles are introduced along with an additional example. We conclude with a note on segmentation of behavior and extensions of Braitenberg's approach.