Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization -- Department for Nonlinear Dynamics and Network Dynamics Group
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Let It Roll – Emerging Sensorimotor Coordination in a Spherical Robot

Ralf Der, Georg Martius, and Frank Hesse (2006)

In: Artificial Life X : Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, edited by L. M. Rocha and L. S. Yaeger and M. A. Bedau and D. Floreano and R. L. Goldstone and A. Vespignani. International Society for Artificial Life, MIT Press, pages 192–198.  ( BibTeX export )

Self-organization and the phenomenen of emergence play an essential role in living systems and form a challenge to artificial life systems. This is not only because systems become more life like but also since self-organization may help in reducing the design efforts in creating complex behavior systems. 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 a spherical robot driven by shifting internal masses. The complex physics of this robotic object is completely unknown to the controller. Nevertheless after a short time the robot develops systematic rolling movements covering large distances with high velocity. In a hilly landscape it is capable of manoeuvering out of the basins and in landscapes with a fixed rotational geometry the robot more or less adatps its movements to this geometry – the controller so to say develops a kind of feeling for its environment although there are no sensors for measuring the positions or the velocity of the robot. We argue that this behavior is a result of the spontaneous symmetry breaking effects which are responsible for the emergence of behavior in our approach.