Learning to feel the physics of a body

Abstract

Despite the tremendous progress in robotic hardware and in both sensorial and computing efficiencies the performance of contemporary autonomous robots is still far below that of simple animals. This has triggered an intensive search for alternative approaches to the control of robots. The present paper exemplifies a general approach to the self-organization of behavior which has been developed and tested in various examples in recent years. We apply this approach to an underactuated "snake" like artifact with a complex physical behavior which is not known to the controller. Due to the weak forces available, the controller so to say has to develop a kind of feeling for the body which is seen to emerge from our approach in a natural way with meandering and rotational collective modes being observed in computer simulation experiments