Towards the Advantages of Hierarchical Anticipatory Behavioral Control

Despite recent successes in control theoretical programs for limb control, behavior-based cognitive approaches for control are somewhat lacking behind. Insights in psychology and neuroscience suggest that the most important ingredients for a successful developmental approach to control are anticipatory mechanisms and hierarchical structures. Anticipatory mechanisms are beneficial in handling noisy sensors, bridging sensory delays, and directing attention and action processing capacities. Moreover, action selection may be immediate using inverse modeling techniques. Hierarchies enable anticipatory influences on multiple levels of abstraction in time and space. This paper provides an overview over recent insights in anticipatory, hierarchical, cognitive behavioral mechanisms, reviews previous modeling approaches, and introduces a novel model well-suited to study hierarchical anticipatory behavioral control in simulated as well as real robotic control scenarios.