Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Developmental robotics
Summary
Developmental robotics (DevRob), sometimes called epigenetic robotics, is a scientific field which aims at studying the developmental mechanisms, architectures and constraints that allow lifelong and open-ended learning of new skills and new knowledge in embodied machines. As in human children, learning is expected to be cumulative and of progressively increasing complexity, and to result from self-exploration of the world in combination with social interaction. The typical methodological approach consists in starting from theories of human and animal development elaborated in fields such as developmental psychology, neuroscience, developmental and evolutionary biology, and linguistics, then to formalize and implement them in robots, sometimes exploring extensions or variants of them. The experimentation of those models in robots allows researchers to confront them with reality, and as a consequence, developmental robotics also provides feedback and novel hypotheses on theories of human and animal development.
Developmental robotics is related to but differs from evolutionary robotics (ER). ER uses populations of robots that evolve over time, whereas DevRob is interested in how the organization of a single robot's control system develops through experience, over time.
DevRob is also related to work done in the domains of robotics and artificial life.
Can a robot learn like a child? Can it learn a variety of new skills and new knowledge unspecified at design time and in a partially unknown and changing environment? How can it discover its body and its relationships with the physical and social environment? How can its cognitive capacities continuously develop without the intervention of an engineer once it is "out of the factory"? What can it learn through natural social interactions with humans? These are the questions at the center of developmental robotics. Alan Turing, as well as a number of other pioneers of cybernetics, already formulated those questions and the general approach in 1950,
but it is only since the end of the 20th century that they began to be investigated systematically.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Related courses (4)
HUM-416: Men/machines I
Cet enseignement croise des approches culturelles (notamment dans les domaines littéraires ou artistiques), sociales et scientifiques pour penser les enjeux, les perspectives et les problèmes que soul
MICRO-453: Robotics practicals
The goal of this lab series is to practice the various theoretical frameworks acquired in the courses on a variety of robots, ranging from industrial robots to autonomous mobile robots, to robotic dev
MICRO-462: Learning and adaptive control for robots
To cope with constant and unexpected changes in their environment, robots need to adapt their paths rapidly and appropriately without endangering humans. this course presents method to react within mi
Related publications (194)