The survival of living organisms is accomplished through regulatory behaviors. In the case
of the specialist Namibian sand-diving lizards, those behaviors are modulated not only in
response to external events in their immediate ecological context but also to satiate their
internal drives. Both homeostasis and allostasis are endogenous processes responsible for
maintaining the internal stability of animal physiological variables, in which allostasis serves
as a controller coordinating multiple ...
The survival of living organisms is accomplished through regulatory behaviors. In the case
of the specialist Namibian sand-diving lizards, those behaviors are modulated not only in
response to external events in their immediate ecological context but also to satiate their
internal drives. Both homeostasis and allostasis are endogenous processes responsible for
maintaining the internal stability of animal physiological variables, in which allostasis serves
as a controller coordinating multiple homeostatic subsystems. By performing homeostatic
and allostatic regulation, the desert-adapted lizard can avoid extreme temperatures while
being able to acquire limited resources. Moreover, a living organism can make behavioral
adaptations to cope with chronic stressful situations presented by its unstable environment.
Yet how multiple internal states are processed and calibrated during those processes has
not been fully clarified due to how inconsistent “allostasis” is understood and applied in
numerous researches. We concentrate allostatic control to behavioral adaptation without
anticipation to highlight that homeostasis and allostasis offer complementary procedures to
withstand immediate instability. This study integrates homeostatic and allostatic regulatory
mechanisms based on interoceptive and exteroceptive cues into a simulated mobile robot
replicating the lizard’s sand-diving and foraging behaviors. To implement drive competition
and conflict resolution in the animal’s brain, we propose a computational model based on
the interaction between the brainstem’s medial Reticular Formation and the hypothalamus.
Such a bio-inspired system is capable of action selection, and thus, can generate complex
behaviors upon stimuli received from both the environment and the agent's internal states.
Finally, we evaluate the robot’s performance under capricious environmental settings. Our
results support a dynamic, reconfigurable hierarchical organization of internal drives as an
essential feature of sufficient regulation that ensures a healthier constitution.
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