A Robot that Walks: Emergent Behaviors from a Carefully Evolved Network

Most animals have significant behavioral expertise built in without having to explicitly learn it all from scratch. This expertise is a product of evolution of the organism; it can be viewed as a very long term form of learning which provides a structured system within which individuals might learn more specialized skills or abilities. This paper suggests one possible mechanism for analagous robot evolution by describing a carefully designed series of networks, each one being a strict augmentation of the previous one, which control a six legged walking machine capable of walking over rough terrain and following a person passively sensed in the infrared spectrum. As the completely decentralized networks are augmented, the robot's performance and behavior repertoire demonstrably improve. The rationale for such demonstrations is that they may provide a hint as to the requirements for automatically building massive networks to carry out complex sensory-motor tasks. The experiments with an actual robot ensure that an essence of reality is maintained and that no critical problems have been ignored.

Specialization of Perceptual Processes

In this report, I discuss the use of vision to support concrete, everyday activity. I will argue that a variety of interesting tasks can be solved using simple and inexpensive vision systems. I will provide a number of working examples in the form of a state-of-the-art mobile robot, Polly, which uses vision to give primitive tours of the seventh floor of the MIT AI Laboratory. By current standards, the robot has a broad behavioral repertoire and is both simple and inexpensive (the complete robot was built for less than $20,000 using commercial board-level components). The approach I will use will be to treat the structure of the agent's activity---its task and environment---as positive resources for the vision system designer. By performing a careful analysis of task and environment, the designer can determine a broad space of mechanisms which can perform the desired activity. My principal thesis is that for a broad range of activities, the space of applicable mechanisms will be broad enough to include a number mechanisms which are simple and economical. The simplest mechanisms that solve a given problem will typically be quite specialized to that problem. One thus worries that building simple vision systems will be require a great deal of {it ad-hoc} engineering that cannot be transferred to other problems. My second thesis is that specialized systems can be analyzed and understood in a principled manner, one that allows general lessons to be extracted from specialized systems. I will present a general approach to analyzing specialization through the use of transformations that provably improve performance. By demonstrating a sequence of transformations that derive a specialized system from a more general one, we can summarize the specialization of the former in a compact form that makes explicit the additional assumptions that it makes about its environment. The summary can be used to predict the performance of the system in novel environments. Individual transformations can be recycled in the design of future systems.