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.