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Contributors
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Theme and Topics of the Workshop: Morphology, motion, and cognition are the three intertwined elements that describe how a moving organism engages with its environment. Theories such as autopoiesis and dynamical descriptions of cognition stress the physical, embodied organism acting in the world. They highlight how embodied, situated organisms must interact with the world through their bodies, and how their morphologies are an integral part of their cognition and behaviour. We now use robots, both real and simulated, to explore these issues because, like organisms, robots are embodied, situated agents that are constructed from closely coupled parts with their own physical dynamics. We acknowledge that the physical attributes and properties of each limb, joint, bone, tendon, muscle, nerve, and neuron contribute to the modulation of both the organism's motion and its cognitive behaviour. In robotics, as in cognitive science, new approaches stress the close interaction between neural systems, body morphodynamics - i.e. the morphologies and motion of the body components - and elements of the environment. Inspired by these ideas, we construct robots whose behaviour is not dominated by an overpowering controller, but rather emerge both from the response of the robots' components to the knocks, nudges, and external forces they experience, and from the internal forces generated by the robot, modulated by perceptual cues that perturb the robots' physical dynamics. It is therefore vital we achieve in our investigations the right balance between our robots' morphological and controlling structures if we are to engineer passive dynamic walkers, develop complex robot morphologies, produce useful robot behaviours, and indeed improve our theoretical understanding of cognitive activity. Researchers in domains outside of robotics, such as ethology and developmental psychology, are taking a growing interest in the closely related issues of motion, morphology, and cognition at many different levels, including that of perception, categorisation, and language. New robotics and artificial life can provide novel models, tools, and approaches for these domains and others to answer questions regarding how cognitive processes are coupled with bodies. These questions include: what role does the morphology play in the cognitive behaviour of an organism or robot? What principles or methodologies can we apply to help us understand that role? How do we implement these new principles in robotics? The physical dynamics of small wheeled robots are usually simple because the power of their motors is generally strong enough to dominate any dynamics the robot may have. How can we design and construct useful robots with more complicated morphologies? Can roboticists that deal with the exploitation of morphologies and motion provide any new insights that can illuminate problems faced by cognitive scientists? To answer these questions, researchers across different fields design robots to make use of the physical dynamics of the parts the robots are constructed from in order to replicate both natural lifelike motions and energy efficient behaviours. Robots are produced using 3D rapid prototyping printers to automatically manufacture robot bodies that have been designed through evolutionary methods. This enables complex morphologies and unusual physical dynamics to be utilised in ways that were difficult or impossible before. The field of evolvable hardware stresses the role of intrinsic morphologies, at the circuit level, with relevant theoretical consequences both for the engineering and cognitive science camps. Before Brooks' groundbreaking work in behaviour-based robotics, most previous methods of building robots used internal models that "mirrored" the external world by representing objects and events. By manipulating the internal model to explore the consequences of performing different actions, conclusions would be drawn about the outside world and thereby an appropriate behaviour selected. This strategy was based upon the prevailing computational cognitive theories of the day, which maintained that an information-theoretic centered system was used to control an organism's body and its physical relations with the world. The organism's higher nervous system was regarded as running "software" that controlled the "hardware" of the body. The behaviour of the body and brain was explained at the algorithmic level, and only at this level would cognitive behaviour be regarded as interesting enough for serious study. In contrast, for the radically different approach to cognition that we will be discussing in this workshop, we regard cognitive activity as crucially dependent upon, and emerging from, the exploitation of physical properties available to the agent. The key principle of this approach is to minimise the amount of control at the algorithmic level by exploiting the dynamics of the agent produced by its interaction with the environment. This modern approach views organisms and robots as dynamic systems, whose parts are continually perturbed by cues from their environments that act to modulate their behaviours. The intention of this workshop is to bring together researchers from robotics, psychology, and ethology to examine and discuss how morphology and motion shapes the perceptual worlds and cognitive behaviours of robots and natural organisms. Topics of accepted papers will include:
Professor Inman Harvey, University of Sussex Professor Rolf Pfeifer, formally at University of Zurich
The workshop will comprise a one-day session on the June 3, and a 3 hours session in the evening of June 4. Programme June 3 Morning
09.00 - 09.30 Fumiya Iida, University of Cambridge, formally at University of Zurich abstract 10.30 - 11.00 Coffee-break
11.00 - 11.30 Malcolm A. MacIver, Northwestern University abstract 12.30 - 14.00 lunch Afternoon
14.00 - 14.30 Invited keynote lecture by Prof. Inman Harvey abstract 15.30 - 16.00 Coffee-break
16.00 - 16.30 Rachel Wood, University of Malta, formally at Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics (CCNR), University of Sussex abstract June 4 Evening
07.30 to 08.30 Invited keynote lecture by Prof. Rolf Pfeifer abstract Publication:
Bill Bigge, Creative Robotics Ltd, formally at University of Sussex
Fernando Almeida e Costa, formally at Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics (CCNR), University of Sussex
Ian Macinnes, formally at Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics (CCNR), University of Sussex
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