Abstract
We present an implementation of a model of very early sensory-motor development, guided by results from developmental psychology. Behavioural acquisition and growth is demonstrated through constraint-lifting mechanisms initiated by global state variables. The results show how staged competence can be shaped by qualitative behaviour changes produced by anatomical, computational and maturational constraints.
Highlights
In the last five years developmental robotics has emerged as a vibrant new research area
Even one of the most well known “developmental” robotics projects, the COG project at MIT (Brooks et al, 1999), has delivered very little in terms of developmental mechanisms. While many such studies in sensory-motor learning have produced methods for generating particular desired behaviours, little real progress has been made on explicit modelling of developmental progression
This will produce a further rich range of attentional, action selection, and sensing issues to deal with but the foundations laid by this work will provide a logical framework
Summary
In the last five years developmental robotics has emerged as a vibrant new research area. Many research projects have explored the issues involved in creating truly autonomous embodied learning agents but only recently has the idea of a developmental approach been investigated as a serious strategy for robot learning. There have been many models of sensory-motor coordination (Lungarella et al, 2003) but most of these have been based on specific, usually connectionist, architectures and tend to focus on a single behavioural task. We are interested in exploring mechanisms that can support the growth of behaviour and the transitions that are observed as behaviour moves through distinct stages of competence. The newborn human infant faces a formidable learning task and yet advances from undirected, uncoordinated, apparently random behaviour to eventual skilled control of motor and sensory systems that support goal-directed action and increasing levels of behavioural and cognitive competence
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