ARTIFICIAL LIFE FROM THE PRINCIPLE OF HOMEOKINESIS

Abstract

Self-organization is a key phenomenon in many systems be they physical, chemical, social or economical in nature. The realisation of agents which are able of self-organizing their behavior forms a major challenge for the engineering of artificial systems. The talk demonstrates our general approach to the self-organization of robotic forms of life which has been developed and tested in various examples in recent years. The robot’s ”brain” consists of a controller and a self model both realized by a neural network. By minimizing the so called time loop error, both the model and the controller are adapted concomitantly from scratch. We apply this approach to different robots with complicated physical properties which are completely unknown to the ”brain”. Nevertheless after some time the robots develop behaviors which are both body and environment related in a completely self-organized way. The applications are demonstrated by several videos of a spherical robot, various snake like artefacts, an artificial dog and a humanoid robot. More information may be found on our video page