Eric Dedieu

Representing robot/environment interactions using probabilities: the "beam in the bin" experiment

The paper presents a very simple robotic experiment to illustrate how probabilistic reasoning may be used for sensory motor systems. We show how our robot may learn internal representations of its interactions with the environment, how it may predict the sensory result of a given action, how it may generate motor command to reach a wished sensory situation, how it may recognize different status and novel conditions and finally how it may behave consistently to simultaneously explore and exploit its environment.

Wings Were Not Designed to Let Animals Fly

“Functional change in structural continuity,” i.e., the opportunistic evolution of functions together with structures, is a major feature of biological evolution. However it has seldom struck a roboticians mind as very relevant for building robots, i.e., for design. This paper proposes starting points for investigating this unusual issue.