Assembly, tuning, and transfer of action systems in infants and robots

This paper seeks to foster a discussion on whether experiments with machines can inform theory in infant motor development and specifically 1 / how the interactions among the parts of a system, including the nervous and musculoskeletal systems and the forces acting on the body, induce organizational changes in the whole, and 2 / how exploratory behavior and selective informational signals at the time scale of skill learning may allow behavior to become stabilized at the longer time scale of development. The paper describes how three generative principles, inspired from developmental biology and shown to underlie the dynamics of infants learning to bounce in a Jolly Jumper, were broken into a set of mechanisms suitable for controlling a robotic system and resulted in a similar developmental profile. A comparison of infant and robot data leads to a set of criteria for improving the usefulness of robotic studies.

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