Related papers: Embodied robots driven by self-organized environme…
Mammals can generate autonomous behaviors in various complex environments through the coordination and interaction of activities at different levels of their central nervous system. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical learning…
A large body of compelling evidence has been accumulated demonstrating that embodiment - the agent's physical setup, including its shape, materials, sensors and actuators - is constitutive for any form of cognition and as a consequence,…
Overcoming robotics challenges in the real world requires resilient control systems capable of handling a multitude of environments and unforeseen events. Evolutionary optimization using simulations is a promising way to automatically…
Automatic design is a promising approach to realizing robot swarms. Given a mission to be performed by the swarm, an automatic method produces the required control software for the individual robots. Automatic design has concentrated on…
Self-organization of heterogeneous particle swarms is rich in its dynamics but hard to design in a traditional top-down manner, especially when many types of kinetically distinct particles are involved. In this chapter, we discuss how we…
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…
Neurobiological theories of spatial cognition developed with respect to recording data from relatively small and/or simplistic environments compared to animals' natural habitats. It has been unclear how to extend theoretical models to large…
The human brain's plasticity allows for the integration of artificial body parts into the human body. Leveraging this, embodied systems realize intuitive interactions with the environment. We introduce a novel concept: embodied swarm…
Spatial reasoning in partially observable environments has often been approached through passive predictive models, yet theories of embodied cognition suggest that genuinely useful representations arise only when perception is tightly…
Grounding autonomous behavior in the nervous system is a fundamental challenge for neuroscience. In particular, the self-organized behavioral development provides more questions than answers. Are there special functional units for…
In many systems motion occurs on deformed and deformable surfaces, setting up the possibility for dynamical interactions solely mediated by the coupling of the entities with their environment. Here we study the "two-body" dynamics of robot…
Soft robotic snakes (SRSs) have a unique combination of continuous and compliant properties that allow them to imitate the complex movements of biological snakes. Despite the previous attempts to develop SRSs, many have been limited to…
Sidewinding, a locomotion strategy characterized by the coordination of lateral and vertical body undulations, is frequently observed in rattlesnakes and has been successfully reconstructed by limbless robotic systems for effective movement…
It is true that the "best" neural network is not necessarily the one with the most "brain-like" behavior. Understanding biological intelligence, however, is a fundamental goal for several distinct disciplines. Translating our understanding…
We review how sensorimotor control is dictated by interacting neural populations, optimal feedback mechanisms, and the biomechanics of bodies. First, we outline the distributed anatomical loops that shuttle sensorimotor signals between…
The wheeled three-link snake robot is a well-known example of an underactuated system modelled using nonholonomic constraints, preventing lateral slippage (skid) of the wheels. A kinematically controlled configuration assumes that both…
Swarming behavior, where coherent motion emerges from the interactions of many mobile agents, is ubiquitous in physics and biology. Moreover, there are many efforts to replicate swarming dynamics in mobile robotic systems which take…
Spatial self-organization emerges in distributed systems exhibiting local interactions when nonlinearities and the appropriate propagation of signals are at work. These kinds of phenomena can be modeled with different frameworks, typically…
Snakes can bend their elongate bodies in various forms to traverse various environments. We understand how snakes use lateral bending to push against asperities on flat ground for propulsion, and snake robots can do so effectively. However,…
In swarm robotics, just as for an animal swarm in Nature, one of the aims is to reach and maintain a desired configuration. One of the possibilities for the team, to reach this aim, is to see what its neighbours are doing. This approach…