On the interplay between morphological, neural and environmental dynamics

摘要

The robust and adaptive behavior exhibited by natural organisms is the result of a complex interaction between various plastic mechanisms acting at different time scales. So far, researchers have concen-trated on one or another of these mechanisms, but little has been done toward integrating them into a unified framework and studying the result of their interplay in a real-world environment. In this article, we present experiments with a small humanoid robot that learns to swing. They illustrate that the exploitation of neural plasticity, entrainment to physical dynamics, and body growth (where each mechanism has a specific time scale) leads to a more efficient exploration of the sensorimotor space and eventually to a more adaptive behavior. Such a result is consistent with observations in develop-mental psychology. Keywords developmental robotics · adaptive behavior · time scales · morphological changes · entrainment 1