The design of autonomous robots has an intimate relationship with the study of autonomous animals and humans—robots provide a convenient puppet show for illustrating current myths about cognition. Like it or not, any approach to the design of autonomous robots is underpinned by some philosophical position in the designer. Whereas a philosophical position normally has to survive in debate, in a project of building situated robots one’s philosophical position affects design decisions and is then tested in the real world—doing philosophy of mind with a screwdriver. I shall discuss, with examples, whether and how Evolutionary Robotics might lead to creating robots that really want to do things—as opposed to ‘merely’ going through the motions; and lead up to the question(s) of robot consciousness.

Inman Harvey is a founder-member of the EASy (Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems) group at Sussex, which is the largest group of researchers in the world into aspects of Artificial Life. He helped to lay the foundations for the Evolutionary approach to Robotics in the early 1990s. Current interests include Gaia Theory, Autopoiesis, homeostasis, Dynamical Systems approaches to understanding cognition, and active control of (semi-)autonomous gliders and kites for energy extraction.

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