Related papers: Open-Ended Evolutionary Robotics: an Information T…
Maximum entropy reinforcement learning motivates agents to explore states and actions to maximize the entropy of some distribution, typically by providing additional intrinsic rewards proportional to that entropy function. In this paper, we…
Information theory is a powerful tool to express principles to drive autonomous systems because it is domain invariant and allows for an intuitive interpretation. This paper studies the use of the predictive information (PI), also called…
The body morphology plays an important role in the way information is perceived and processed by an agent. We address an information theory (IT) account on how the precision of sensors, the accuracy of motors, their placement, the body…
Evolution sculpts both the body plans and nervous systems of agents together over time. In contrast, in AI and robotics, a robot's body plan is usually designed by hand, and control policies are then optimized for that fixed design. The…
Our goal is to enable robots to \emph{time} their motion in a way that is purposefully expressive of their internal states, making them more transparent to people. We start by investigating what types of states motion timing is capable of…
Many technical solutions are bio-inspired. Octopus-inspired robotic arms belong to continuum robots which are used in minimally invasive surgery or for technical system restoration in areas difficult-toaccess. Continuum robot missions are…
Living systems process sensory data to facilitate adaptive behaviour. A given sensor can be stimulated as the result of internally driven activity, or by purely external (environmental) sources. It is clear that these inputs are processed…
Autonomy is a hallmark of animal intelligence, enabling adaptive and intelligent behavior in complex environments without relying on external reward or task structure. Existing reinforcement learning approaches to exploration in reward-free…
Evolutionary strategies have recently been shown to achieve competing levels of performance for complex optimization problems in reinforcement learning. In such problems, one often needs to optimize an objective function subject to a set of…
The interaction networks of biological systems are known to take on several non-random structural properties, some of which are believed to positively influence system robustness. Researchers are only starting to understand how these…
Learning is the basis of both biological and artificial systems when it comes to mimicking intelligent behaviors. From the classical PPO (Proximal Policy Optimization), there is a series of deep reinforcement learning algorithms which are…
In nature, biological organisms jointly evolve both their morphology and their neurological capabilities to improve their chances for survival. Consequently, task information is encoded in both their brains and their bodies. In robotics,…
Robot swarms often exhibit emergent behaviors that are fascinating to observe; however, it is often difficult to predict what swarm behaviors can emerge under a given set of agent capabilities. We seek to efficiently leverage human input to…
Shannon's information entropy measures of the uncertainty of an event's outcome. If learning about a system reflects a decrease in uncertainty, then a plausible intuition is that learning should be accompanied by a decrease in the entropy…
Designing controllers for robot swarms is challenging, because human developers have typically no good understanding of the link between the details of a controller that governs individual robots and the swarm behavior that is an indirect…
In this article, we propose a sampling-based motion planning algorithm equipped with an information-theoretic convergence criterion for incremental informative motion planning. The proposed approach allows dense map representations and…
This work presents and evaluates a novel strategy for robotic exploration that leverages human models of uncertainty perception. To do this, we introduce a measure of uncertainty that we term "Behavioral entropy", which builds on Prelec's…
Traditional Evolutionary Robotics (ER) employs evolutionary techniques to search for a single monolithic controller which can aid a robot to learn a desired task. These techniques suffer from bootstrap and deception issues when the tasks…
The dynamics of molecular collisions in a macroscopic body are encoded by the parameter Thermodynamic entropy - a statistical measure of the number of molecular configurations that correspond to a given macrostate. Directionality in the…
Autonomous robot swarms must be able to make fast and accurate collective decisions, but speed and accuracy are known to be conflicting goals. While collective decision-making is widely studied in swarm robotics research, only few works on…