[alife] CFP: Developmental Robotics

[Douglas S. Blank]

CALL FOR PAPERS

AAAI Spring Symposium: Developmental Robotics
March 21-23, 2005 at Stanford University

Submission deadline October 8, 2004
For details see http://cs.brynmawr.edu/DevRob05/

Developmental robotics is a new approach that focuses on the
autonomous self-organization of general-purpose control systems.
Developmental robotics is a move away from task-specific methodologies
where a robot is designed to solve a particular pre-defined problem.
This new approach explores the kinds of perceptual, cognitive, and
behavioral capabilities that a robot can discover through
self-motivated actions based on its own physical morphology and the
dynamic structure of its environment.  Initially a developmental
system might bootstrap itself with some innate knowledge or behavior,
but with experience could create more complex representations and
actions, leading to complete Autonomous Mental Development (AMD)[1].
Developmental robotics is different from many learning and
evolutionary systems in that the reinforcement signal, teacher target,
or fitness function comes from within the system. In this manner,
these systems are designed to rely more on mechanisms such as
self-motivation, homeostasis, or emotions.

We invite contributions on architectures for developmental robotics,
examples of developmental behavior in robots, as well as features or
mechanisms of developmental processing including, but not limited to:
self-organization, self-exploration, self-motivation, categorization,
artificial emotional systems, value systems, and anticipation-driven
learning.

[1] Weng, J., McClelland, J., Pentland, A., Sporns, O., Stockman, I.,
Sur M., and Thelen, E. (2000). Autonomous Mental Development by Robots
and Animals, Science, vol. 291, no. 5504, pp. 599 - 600. Available at
http://www.cse.msu.edu/dl/SciencePaper.pdf