Guided Self-organisation for Autonomous Robot Development
Georg Martius, Michael Herrmann, and Ralf Der (2007)
In: Advances in Artificial Life 9th European Conference, ECAL 2007, Lisbon, Portugal, edited by Almeida e Costa and Francesco. Springer, pages 766-775. ( BibTeX export )
The paper presents a method to guide the self-organised development of behaviours
of autonomous robots.
In earlier publications we demonstrated how to use the homeokinesis principle
and dynamical systems theory to obtain self-organised playful but goal-free behaviour.
Now we extend this framework by reinforcement signals.
We validate the mechanisms with two experiment with a spherical robot.
The first experiment aims at fast motion, where the robot reaches on average
about twice the speed of a not reinforcement robot.
In the second experiment spinning motion is rewarded and we demonstrate
that the robot successfully develops
pirouettes and curved motion which
only rarely occur among the natural behaviours of the robot.