Developmental robotics: Difference between revisions

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'''Developmental Robotics''' (DevRob), sometimes called '''[[epigenetics|epigenetic]] robotics''', is a scientific field which aims at studying the developmental mechanisms, architectures and constraints that allow lifelong and open-ended learning of new skills and new knowledge in embodied [[machine|machines]]. As in human children, [[learning]] is expected to be cumulative and of progressively increasing complexity, and to result from self-exploration of the world in combination with [[social relation|social interaction]]. The typical methodological approach consists in starting from theories of human and animal development elaborated in fields such as [[developmental psychology]], [[neuroscience]], [[developmental biology|developmental]] and [[evolutionary biology]], and [[linguistics]], then to formalize and implement them in robots, sometimes exploring extensions or variants of them. The experimentation of those models in robots allows researchers to confront them with reality, and as a consequence developmental robotics also provides feedback and novel hypothesis on theories of human and animal development.

Developmental robotics is related to, but differs from, [[evolutionary robotics]] (ER). ER uses populations of robots that evolve over time, whereas DevRob is interested in how the organization of a single robot's control system develops through experience, over time.

DevRob is also related to work done in the domains of [[Roboticsrobotics]], and [[Artificialartificial Lifelife]].

== Background ==

Can a robot learn like a child? Can it learn a variety of new skills and new knowledge unspecified at design time and in a partially unknown and changing environment? How can it discover its body and its relationships with the physical and social environment? How can its cognitive capacities continuously develop without the intervention of an engineer once it is "out of the factory"? What can it learn through natural social interactions with humans? These are the questions at the centrecenter of developmental robotics. Alan Turing, as well as a number of other pioneers of cybernetics, already formulated those questions and the general approach in 1950,<ref name="Turing50">{{cite journal

| last = Turing | first = A.M. | date = 1950 | url = http://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf | title = Computing machinery and intelligence | journal = Mind | publisher = LIX | issue = 236 | pages = 433–460 }}</ref>

but it is only since the end of the 20th century that they began to be investigated systematically.<ref name="Weng01">{{cite journal