Abstract

Braitenberg's essay "Vehicles. Experiments in synthetic psychology" has had a tremendous impact on the development of contemporary robotics. This paper reviews some of the questions raised in the book - mainly concerning the mechanistic explanation of biological behavior - which have most influenced robotics, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. The citations made in the literature will be taken as a guideline for this survey: this will help reconstruct the ways in which Braitenberg's book has been assimilated in the collective imagination of contemporary robotics.