Developmental robotics: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 13:02, 22 October 2020

Revision as of 13:04, 22 October 2020

Line 51:

Another important challenge is to allow robots to perceive, interpret and leverage the diversity of [[Multimodal_interaction|multimodal]] social cues provided by non-engineer humans during human-robot interaction. These capacities are so far, mostly too limited to allow efficient general-purpose teaching from humans.

A fundamental scientific issue to be understood and resolved, which applied equally to human development, is how compositionality, functional hierarchies, primitives, and modularity, at all levels of sensorimotor and social structures, can be formed and leveraged during development. This is deeply linked with the problem of the emergence of symbols, sometimes referred to as the "[[symbol grounding problem]]" when it comes to language acquisition. Actually, the very existence and need for symbols in the brain isare actively questioned, and alternative concepts, still allowing for compositionality and functional hierarchies are being investigated.

During biological epigenesis, morphology is not fixed but rather develops in constant interaction with the development of sensorimotor and social skills. The development of morphology poses obvious practical problems with robots, but it may be a crucial mechanism that should be further explored, at least in simulation, such as in morphogenetic robotics.

Line 59:

Similarly, in biology, developmental mechanisms (operating at the ontogenetic time scale) interact closely with evolutionary mechanisms (operating at the phylogenetic time scale) as shown in the flourishing "[[evo-devo]]" scientific literature.<ref name="Muller07">{{cite journal

| last1 = Müller | first1 = G. B. | date = 2007 | title = Evo-devo: extending the evolutionary synthesis | journal = Nature Reviews Genetics | volume = 8 | issue = 12 | pages = 943–949 | doi=10.1038/nrg2219 | pmid=17984972}}</ref>

However, the interaction of those mechanisms in artificial organisms, developmental robots, in particular, is still vastly understudied. The interaction of evolutionary mechanisms, unfolding morphologies and developing sensorimotor and social skills will thus be a highly stimulating topic for the future of developmental robotics.

==Main journals==