Goal-oriented behavior from guided self-organization of sensorimotor loops

We start from the self-organized development of behaviors based on the homeokinetic principle and demonstrate the emergence of playful and embodied behaviors using a variety of robotic systems. We present two ways to guide the self-organization process towards desired behaviors.

The first method integrates an online reward signal into the framework to modulate the speed of search in the behavior space. This increases the likelihood to find and perform rewarded behavior. We validate this mechanism using a spherical robot. Second, we propose a mechanism to specify symmetries of the physical system or of the desired behaviors as soft-constraints. This reduces the effective dimensionality of the system and leads to an efficient self-exploration, which we illustrate using high-dimensional robots.