Can development be designed? What we may learn from the Cog Project

Abstract

Neither design nor evolutionary approaches to building behaviorbased robots feature a role for development in the genesis of behavioral organization. However, the new Cog Project aims to build a humanoid robot that will display behavioral abilities observed in human infants; and proposes making use of ideas from evolution and developmental psychology in its design. This paper provisionally evaluates this work from a developmental perspective, to show how developmental study may offer not only a source of phenomena for modelling but also a method that contributes to our understanding of self-organization. Cog's design methodology confronts problems with selection and interpretation of component behaviors, and how these may be better understood through appropriate developmental study is illustrated. Cog's design principles are shown to exhibit interesting convergences with infant mechanisms, based on the significance of emergent functionality and the action- as opposed to representation-based nature of initial and outcome mechanisms, but analysis of infants suggests a more constructive view of ability is required.