Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization -- Department for Nonlinear Dynamics and Network Dynamics Group
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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.