This book presents biologically inspired walking machines interacting with their physical environment, and shows how the morphology and behavior control of machines can benefit from biological studies. The purpose is to develop a modular structure of neural control generating reactive behaviors of the physical walking machines, to analyze the neural mechanisms underlying them, and to demonstrate the sensor fusion technique leading to smooth switching between appropriate behaviors, like obstacle avoidance and sound tropism.

This book presents biologically inspired walking machines interacting with their physical environment, and shows how the morphology and behavior control of machines can benefit from biological studies. The purpose is to develop a modular structure of neural control generating reactive behaviors of the physical walking machines, to analyze the neural mechanisms underlying them, and to demonstrate the sensor fusion technique leading to smooth switching between appropriate behaviors, like obstacle avoidance and sound tropism.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, SAB 2018, held in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, in August 2018.The 21 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 39 submissions. They cover the main areas in animat research, including the animat approach and methodology, perception and motor control, action selection and navigation, learning and adaptation, and collective and social behavior.