Developmental Robots: Theory, Method and Experimental Results

It is very challenging for humans to program a humanoid robot to act properly in human environment. Humans have a fundamental limitation in constructing an adequate model for the world or an adequate behavior model for the robot, because of the complexity of such models and the unpredictable unknown environments that the models must apply. This article introduces a new approach to intelligent robots, the developmental approach, which is different from other existing major approaches: knowledge-based, behaviorbased, learning-based, and evolutionary approaches. The developmental approach is motivated by human mental development from infancy to adulthood, during which each human individual develops his cognitive and behavioral capabilities through interactions with the environment. This approach results in a new kind of robots, developmental robots — robots that can develop automatically. These robots require a new kind of algorithm — developmental algorithm — which enables the robot to learn new tasks without a need of reprogramming, including those tasks that the human programmer does not understand or cannot predict. This paper introduces the basic theory of developmental robots, the SAIL robot, the SAIL developmental architecture, the SAIL-2 developmental algorithm, and some experimental results from our SAIL project.