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For example, this could enable the system to locally engage in an activity in
an inflamed area in order to prevent damage. In the case of an overheating motor
this localisation feature ensures that a nearby fan gets switched on, rather than
a fan in a distant part of the robot.
The inflammatory response is simply accumulated over time from the indi-
vidual TLR response levels. The sum of TLR activity is calculated at each time
step and added to the current inflammation level. Also at each time step the
inflammation level is geometrically decayed. Thus the formula for updating the
inflammation at each time step is as follows:
n
inf
t
+1
=
decay
×
(
inf
t
+
f
(
TLR
x
))
(1)
x
=1
where
inf
t
is the inflammation level at time
t
,
decay
is a scalar in the range
0
<decay<
1and
f
(
TLR
x
) is the activation level of the
x
'th individual TLR
from a set of
n
in the complete system.
3
Innate Autonomy
A detailed description of the functionality of the model follows, presenting a
framework for robot autonomy based on the innate immune system.
Assuming a simplistic robot comprising of four motors, two fans and four
sensors each measuring the temperature of one motor, a description of each step
of the model is given. The robot is initially in a stable, homeostatic state from
which it will deviate over the duration of the description of the model. The
homeostatic state is defined to be when the four motors are operating contin-
uously with the fans switched off. All four motors can be switched on and off
at any point in time, according to the activity of TLRs (based on the motor
temperatures). Both fans can also be triggered (also by the TLRs) to cool the
motors.
3.1
PAMPs
At regular intervals sensors within the robot collect data about the robot's state
and convert this data into signals. These signals are analogous to PAMPs in the
human body. These signals are collected by the corresponding TLRs in order to
monitor and respond locally to the state of the system. In our example robot
these are simply the temperatures of each individual motor.
3.2
TLRs
If one motor is overheating while the others are functioning correctly, the associ-
ated sensor generates a PAMP which is passed to the related TLR. A PAMP is
defined to be a sensor reading that deviates from normal according to a prede-
fined function, which operates as part of the TLR. Each TLR has a predefined
