Morphological Computation --- Connecting Brain, Body, and Environment

Authors:
Rolf Pfeifer;Gabriel Gómez
Affiliations:
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland CH-8050;Humanoid Robotics Group, CSAIL, MIT, Cambridge, USA MA 02139
Venue:
Creating Brain-Like Intelligence
Year:
2009

Citing 5
Cited 2

Passive dynamic walking

International Journal of Robotics Research
Understanding intelligence

Understanding intelligence
How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence (Bradford Books)

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Controlling the Walking Period of a Pneumatic Muscle Walker

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A modular neural network architecture for step-wise learning of grasping tasks

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Living Machines'13 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems

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Abstract

Traditionally, in robotics, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience, there has been a focus on the study of the control or the neural system itself. Recently there has been an increasing interest in the notion of embodiment not only in robotics and artificial intelligence, but also in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. In this paper, we introduce the notion of morphological computation and demonstrate how it can be exploited on the one hand for designing intelligent, adaptive robotic systems, and on the other for understanding natural systems. While embodiment has often been used in its trivial meaning, i.e. "intelligence requires a body", the concept has deeper and more important implications, concerned with the relation between physical and information (neural, control) processes. Morphological computation is about connecting body, brain and environment. A number of case studies are presented to illustrate the concept. We conclude with some speculations about potential lessons for neuroscience and robotics, in particular for building brain-like intelligence, and we present a theoretical scheme that can be used to embed the diverse case studies.