A new North Texas E-News article covers the research of Derek Harter of Texas A&M-Commerce. Derek is working with other researchers on a NASA-funded project to develop robots with insect-level intelligence for applications in space exploration. Specifically, he's studying self-organizing ontogenetic development for autonomous adaptive systems (SODAS). In the article he talks about the changes taking place in the fields of robotics, AI, and cognitive science. Past researchers trying to construct intelligent machines by studying human congnition and using a top-down approach were largely unsuccessful. More recent researchers like Rodney Brooks have turned things around, studying insects to build insect level intelligence into machines. Now cognitive scientists are finding that robotics provide a concrete way of studying and modeling human cognition, more useful than the abstract methods of pure AI.