Incremental Embodied Chaotic Exploration of Self-Organized Motor Behaviors with Proprioceptor Adaptation

*Correspondence: Phil Husbands, Department of Informatics, Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QJ, UK e-mail: [email protected] This paper presents a general and fully dynamic embodied artificial neural system, which incrementally explores and learns motor behaviors through an integrated combination of chaotic search and reflex learning. The former uses adaptive bifurcation to exploit the intrinsic chaotic dynamics arising from neuro-body-environment interactions, while the latter is based around proprioceptor adaptation. The overall iterative search process formed from this combination is shown to have a close relationship to evolutionary methods. The architecture developed here allows realtime goal-directed exploration and learning of the possible motor patterns (e.g., for locomotion) of embodied systems of arbitrary morphology. Examples of its successful application to a simple biomechanical model, a simulated swimming robot, and a simulated quadruped robot are given.The tractability of the biomechanical systems allows detailed analysis of the overall dynamics of the search process. This analysis sheds light on the strong parallels with evolutionary search.