Robots as Examples for Embodiment

• Early toys, e.g. Tati

 

• A best known example: Cog

                     Humanoid Robotics Group at MIT (Rodney Brooks)



 


Ultimately, it comes from Rod Brooks' Genghis (the first in a long serieas of mobile robots)
        Read about Genghis:
        Brooks, Rodney A. " A Robot That Walks; Emergent Behaviors from a Carefully Evolved Network ,"
        [pdf format], MIT AI Lab Memo 1091, February 1989.






What is Embodiment in Robotics and
How does it Relate to the Mind?

• "Embodiment" = means "a real body plus NN based control"
• ensures direct meaning for internal states as motor states of the body
• direct control, where controller is in the style of the controlled, 
• plus learning  ("Behavior based", not cognitive)
  

• Leads to endless questions of representation
• Here are two examples (one old, one recent)

        Rod Brooks ' famous "Intelligence Without Representation" ,
                    Artificial Intelligence Journal (47), 1991, pp. 139–159.

        William Bechtel  and the problem of the Watt centrifugal governor in
                    Bechtel, W. (1998). Representations and cognitive explanations:
                    Assessing the dynamicist challenge in cognitive science.  
                    Cognitive Science, 22, 295-318.



Most recent challenge of representation by NN and E


      The dynamic hypothesis            more general than NN       

                                                                  Tim van Gelder         Golem         Jordan Pollack
                                                                                   

This is not the direction I want to go.