Book Review: New Directions (and Insights) in Braitenberg Vehicles and Cognitive Science

A review of Scott Hotton and Jeff Yoshimi's The Open Dynamics of Braitenberg Vehicles (MIT Press, 2024, 246 pp.). Alicea situates the book as a departure from Braitenberg's original anthropomorphized toy models: rather than mimicking complex behavior directly, Hotton and Yoshimi analyze the geometry of dynamical pairwise physical interactions between agents. Their open-dynamical-systems framing gives each vehicle two coupled state spaces — its own internal state and its environmental state — so that one vehicle's output becomes the next vehicle's input. The review reads this coupling as a source of the same continuous feedback loops that underlie emergent swarming and flocking behavior, linking the book to the broader literature on coupled dynamical systems.