==== Machine Wilderness Glossary ====


**acclimation** adapting to present environmental conditions\\

**adaptation** within-species evolutionary response to a particular often new environment\\

**adaptive radiation** occurs in nature where conditions appear to favour unusually high rates of speciation, like oceanic archipelagos in ecology and long term research programmes and budgets in robotics\\

**augmented ecology** the study of how nature is going online\\

**algorithmic landscape** \\

**allometry** size related differences in behaviour or life cycle events, for example battery size and weight are a well-known limiting factors to robotic behaviour \\
see computational overhang\\

**animal as platform** the organism seen as a base for added functionalities \\
see platform diverse body\\

**background subtraction**\\

**behavioural code** software encoding robotic behaviour and phenology\\

**behavioural signatures** patterns in behaviour of animals in ecological studies collected through remote sensing technologies
see libraries of signatures\\

**bionics** also known as biomimetics, biognosis or biomimicry is the application of biological methods and systems found in nature to the study and design of engineering systems and modern technology\\
see biorobotics\\

**biorobotics** a study of how to make robots that emulate or simulate living biological organisms mechanically or chemically\\

**computational overhang** refers to any situation in which new algorithms can suddenly and dramatically exploit existing computational power far more efficiently than before\\

**conspecific / intraspecific**\\

**conformance / regulatory** \\

**conservation algorithm**\\

**conservation drone**\\

**convergent evolution**\\

**cyberpoaching** hunting endangered species through GPS data in online media (Flickr, Instagram) or by hacking GPS based trackers used in scientific research\\

**dark biodiversity** a term coined by Nigel Pitman reflecting the problem of dark matter in astrophysics; some landscapes are so vast and biodiverse that they are fundamentally unknowable, organisms live and die at densities below our capacity to research or even see\\

**drive power** the energy source or sources for the robot actuators\\

**emergent behaviour** a complicated resultant behaviour that emerges from the repeated operation of simple underlying behaviours\\

**epizoic media** refers to the rich sensor sets carried by animals that have evolved from basic GPS and data-loggers onwards\\

**evolutionary acceleration** where evolutionary transformation rate is increased\\
see hypermorphosis\\

**evolvability** concerning any system — a society or culture, for example, that has evolvable characteristics and the different rates of evolutionary change they contain. For example: the use of tools within a culture may show observable evolvability -from stones to drones- at a timescale at which human physiology has remained nearly the same.\\

**faraday forest** data refugia, cryptogeography \\

**farmerless landscape**\\

**forward chaining** a process in which events or received data are considered by an entity to intelligently adapt its behaviour\\

**prototyping habitat**\\

**hypermorphosis**\\

**info-chemicals**\\

**IoO** internet of organisms\\
see connected ecosystem\\

**kinematics** the study of motion, as applied to robots\\

**library of signatures** capturing a wide range of phenology of an organism through sensor technology to form a database of behavioural signatures\\

**life-history evolution**\\

**machine wilderness**\\

**maximum envelope** (space), the volume of space encompassing the maximum designed movements of all robot parts including the end-effector, workpiece, and attachments\\

**platform diverse body** identity routed across the biosphere, cybersphere, and virtual environments see animal as platform\\

**population enrichment** a population is studied before and after addition of 
individuals\\

**prototype**\\

**qualia**\\

**robochory** the dispersal of plant seeds by machines, both externally or internally by digestion, adapted from zoochory which relates to dispersal by animals\\


**robot Darwinism** a term coined by battling robot pioneer Pete Abrahamson, has left the field with only three major robot archetypes:
  - lifters which had wedged sides and could use forklift-like prongs to flip pure wedges.
  - spinners which were smooth, circular wedges with blades on their bottom side for disabling and breaking lifters.
  - pure wedges which could still flip spinners.

**semiotics** incl alarm calls chemical reception\\

**semiosphere** \\

**smart collar** next generation GPS trackers for pets, farm animals or wild animals\\
see behavioural signatures\\

**slow speed control** a mode of robot motion control where the velocity of the robot is limited to allow organisms sufficient time either to withdraw the hazardous motion or stop the robot\\

**staged authenticity** the staging of naturalistic behaviour to create an impression of authenticity, originally stated by Dean MacCannell in relation to tourism\\

**subsumption architecture** a robot architecture that uses a modular, bottom-up design beginning with the least complex behavioural tasks\\

**swarm robotics** is to robotics what population ecology is to animals\\

**uncanny valley** a hypothesized zone in which humanoid robot behavior and appearance begin to approach that of actual humans, but are still missing vital elements, to the point that these mimicked actions or images cause revulsion\\

**unmanned conservation**\\

**wired wilderness**\\

method:

1 try it yourself, hands-on
2 work in situ
3 talk to the specialists and the outsiders