Taming the beast: Guided self-organization of behavior in autonomous robots

Abstract

Self-organizing processes are crucial for the development of living beings. Practical applications in robots may benefit from the self-organization of behavior, e.g. for the increased fault tolerance and enhanced flexibility provided that external goals can also be achieved. We present several methods for the guidance of self-organizing control by externally prescribed criteria. We show that the degree of self-organized explorativity of the robot can be regulated and that problem-specific error functions, hints, or abstract symbolic descriptions of a goal can be reconciled with the continuous robot dynamics. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.