I'm not exactly sure why I'm writing about this at present, but I think it may have something to do with the artwork -- I'm currently reading "The Cyberiad", by Stanislaw Lem with artwork by Daniel Mróz and the books remind me of each other, although one is fiction (Lem) and the other is robotics and psychology.

I actually read Vehicles ages go in my first robotics class. It is a look at the possibilities of intelligence and evolution, showing how complex behaviors can be build up out of small pieces. The book is really laid out as a gedanken experiment -- one that is grounded in biology as the last half of the book points out. The books starts with a description of the vehicles, then proceeds to show how they might exhibit behaviors such as fear, love, and hate, learn to recognize shapes, think, plan and so on. This correlates with a paradigm in robotics called the behavioral (or reactive) paradigm, which states that complex behaviors can be built up out of the complex interaction of many simple behaviors. This is a vast simplification, so see the literature for more information.

That said, this is a great little book that is as much a meditation on though, development, psychology and evolution as it is on robotics.