Channeling Self-Organization

Abstract

Many desired behaviors are distinguished by a certain structure in the motor or sensor activity. In particular the phase relation between different motors or sensors capture a lot of this structure. We will now propose a way to embed these relations as soft constrains to the learning system, such that we break certain symmetries and let desired behaviors emerge. Starting from the guidance by teaching we introduce the concept of crossmotor teaching that allows to specify abstract relations between motor channels. First we study simple pairwise relations and shape the behavior of the TwoWheeled robot to drive mostly straight by a relation between both motor neurons. Then we will consider a high-dimensional robot-the Armband and demonstrate fast locomotion behaviors from scratch by guided self-organization.