| authorlink1 = Pierre-Yves Oudeyer | last1 = Oudeyer | first1 = P-Y. | date = 2010 | url = http://www.pyoudeyer.com/IEEETAMDOudeyer10.pdf | title = On the impact of robotics in behavioral and cognitive sciences: from insect navigation to human cognitive development | journal = IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development | volume = 2 | issue = 1 | pages = 2–16 | doi=10.1109/tamd.2009.2039057}}</ref>
Because the concept of adaptive intelligent machine is central to developmental robotics, isit has relationships with fields such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive robotics or computational neuroscience. Yet, while it may reuse some of the techniques elaborated in these fields, it differs from them from many perspectives. It differs from classical artificial intelligence because it does not assume the capability of advanced symbolic reasoning and focuses on embodied and situated sensorimotor and social skills rather than on abstract symbolic problems. It differs from traditional machine learning because it targets task- independent self-determined learning rather than task-specific inference over "spoon fed human-edited sensori data" (Weng et al., 2001). It differs from cognitive robotics because it focuses on the processes that allow the formation of cognitive capabilities rather than these capabilities themselves. It differs from computational neuroscience because it focuses on functional modeling of integrated architectures of development and learning. More generally, developmental robotics is uniquely characterized by the following three features:
# It targets task-independent architectures and learning mechanisms, i.e. the machine/robot has to be able to learn new tasks that are unknown by the engineer;
# It emphasizes open-ended development and lifelong learning, i.e. the capacity of an organism to acquire continuously novel skills. This should not be understood as a capacity for learning "anything" or even “everything”, but just that the set of skills that is acquired can be infinitely extended at least in some (not all) directions;
