Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization -- Department for Nonlinear Dynamics and Network Dynamics Group
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Learning to Feel the Physics of a Body

Ralf Der, Frank Hesse, and Georg Martius (2005)

In: CIMCA '05: Proc. of the Intl. Conf on Computational Intelligence for Modelling, Control and Automation and Intl. Conf. on Intelligent Agents, Web Technologies and Internet Commerce Vol-2 (CIMCA-IAWTIC'05). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, pages 252–257.  ( BibTeX export )

Despite the tremendous progress in robotic hardware and in both sensorial and computing efficiencies the performance of contemporary autonomous robots is still far below that of simple animals. This has triggered an intensive search for alternative approaches to the control of robots. The present paper exemplifies a general approach to the self-organization of behavior which has been developed and tested in various examples in recent years. We apply this approach to an underactuated snake like artifact with a complex physical behavior which is not known to the controller. Due to the weak forces available, the controller so to say has to develop a kind of feeling for the body which is seen to emerge from our approach in a natural way with meandering and rotational collective modes being observed in computer simulation experiments.