We have decided to discontinue the publication of preprints on our preprint server end of 2024. The publication culture within mathematics has changed so much due to the rise of repositories such as ArXiV (www.arxiv.org) that we are encouraging all institute members to make their preprints available there. An institute's repository in its previous form is, therefore, unnecessary. The preprints published to date will remain available here, but we will not add any new preprints here.
A local learning rule for recurrent neural networks is derived by introducing neurons as self-regulating units. Acting as controllers for the behaviour of autonomous mobile agents, neural systems endowed with this learning rule generate interesting agent-environment interactions, which depend on the underlying connectivity of the network. The dynamical phenomenology of a single neuron and a two neuron network is analysed, and, as an example, the generation of obstacle avoidance behaviour of a miniature Khepera robot is presented.