Illustration of an autonomous sweep-generating artificial agent. The agent is shown at a series of three positions as it moves from left to right. At each time step, it generates a beam-shaped ‘sweep’ (white illuminated regions) in a particular direction (blue arrows). The sweep footprints persist in time and serve as a memory trace of previously covered locations. At the current time step (right), the agent calculates the direction that minimizes overlap with the coverage trace; this will become the direction of its next sweep.
