A rational agent for a micromouse – Oliver Fish

How autonomous vehicles make decisions in uncertain environments is one of the key problems faced in their construction.  There are three main ways that these systems make decisions. The first is reaction and adaptation, which is how the vehicle interacts with the environment using sensors. The next is rules and regulations, these are the regulations that the vehicle should follow, they aren’t totally specific but do provide a general idea of what should be done. The highest level is ethics and principles. These are used when you don’t know exactly what you should be doing. They are very general principles such as do no harm.

Modularity is a very important part of the technological architecture. Each component should be divided into distinct and interchangeable modules.

Another is transparency. We don’t want the autonomous vehicle or any part of it be a ‘black box’ where we cannot see how it has made the decision it has. The internal behaviour of each module should be inspectable. There should also be a concise, formal description of the expected behaviour of each component, to be able to verify how these work.

When building a driverless car, all of these parts come together. Modularity is important as it allows individual parts of the car such as obstacle avoidance, navigation and decision making to be tested and verified individually. Without transparency and verification the vehicle will have a very low trustworthiness and wont be commercially viable. Each part of the decision making process is very important here, as cars often make decisions that could injure or kill someone.

These ideas are still important to implement when constructing something as harmless as a micromouse. Modularity will improve performance by allowing different components to be tested. Transparency and verification are required for proper testing of the micromouse. Some parts of the decision making process are less relevant given the micromouse will only be facing a few, predictable environments, so the ethics and principles part of decision making is certainly less relevant, and the reaction and adaptation is more important.