Neurorobotics: Neurobiologically Inspired Robots

Neurorobots1 are robotic devices that have control systems based on principles of the nervous system. These models operate on the premise that the “brain is embodied and the body is embedded in the environment.” Therefore, neurorobots are grounded and situated in a real environment. The real environment is required for two reasons. First, simulating an environment can introduce unwanted and unintentional biases to the model. For example, a computer-generated object presented to a vision model has its shape and segmentation defined by the modeler and directly presented to the model, whereas a device that views an object hanging on a wall has to discern the shape and figure from ground segmentation based on its on active vision. Second, real environments are rich, multimodal, and noisy; an artificial design of such an environment would be computationally intensive and difficult to simulate. However, all these interesting features of the environment come for “free” when a neurorobot is placed in the real world.