Building Aunt Hillary: Creating Artificial Minds with ‘Neural Nests’

This paper describes work in progress to enable a real robot to recreate trail following of ants engaged in pheromone-reinforced recruitment to food gathering. Specifically, it is proposed that development of a set of macro-behaviours for creating and following a trail can be achieved by use of micro-behaviours in a simulated environment to develop a novel neural architecture – the Neural Nest – for learning without explicit representation. A simulated ’neural nest’ has been tested to determine the feasibility for ant colonies to encode higher-level behaviours for controlling a physical robot. In our experiments, the emergent behaviour from reinforcement of interactions between unsupervised simple agents, can allow a robot to sense and react to external stimuli in an appropriate way, under the control of a non-deterministic pheromone trail following program. Future work will be to implement the architecture entirely on the physical robot in real time.