"Researchers now agree that intelligence always manifests itself in behavior - thus it is behavior that we must understand. An exciting new field has grown around the study of behavior-based intelligence, also known as embodied cognitive science, "new AI," and "behavior-based AI."" "Rolf Pfeifer and Christian Scheier provide a systematic introduction to this new way of thinking about intelligence and computers. After discussing concepts and approaches such as subsumption architecture, Braitenberg vehicles, evolutionary robotics, artificial life, self-organization, and learning, the authors derive a set of principles and a coherent framework for the study of naturally and artificially intelligent systems, or autonomous agents. This framework is based on a synthetic methodology whose goal is understanding by designing and building."--BOOK JACKET.