On the Ecological Approach to Information and Control for Roboticists

The ongoing and increasingly important trend in robotics to conceive designs that decentralize control is paralleled by currently active research paradigms in the study of perception and action. James Gibson's ecological approach is one of these paradigms. Gibson's approach emerged in part as a reaction to representationalist and computationalist approaches, which devote the bulk of their resources to the study of internal processes. The ecological approach instead focuses on constraints and ambient energy patterns in the animal-environment coalition. The present article reviews how the emphasis on the environment by ecological psychologists has given rise to the concepts of direct perception, higher order information, active information pick up, information-based control laws, prospective control, and direct learning. Examples are included to illustrate these concepts and to show how they can be applied to the construction of robots. Action is described as emergent and self-organized. It is argued that knowledge about perception, action, and learning as it occurs in living organisms may facilitate the construction of robots, more obviously so if the aim is to construct (to some extent) biologically plausible robots.