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Updated: May 27, 2026

The Modular Design and Production of an Intelligent Robot Based on a Closed-Loop Control Strategy
Published on: October 14, 2017
Variants of guided self-organization for robot control
Georg Martius1, J Michael Herrmann
1Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience and Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Bunsenstr. 10, 37073, Göttingen, Germany. martius@mis.mpg.de
Abstract:
Autonomous robots can generate exploratory behavior by self-organization of the sensorimotor loop. We show that the behavioral manifold that is covered in this way can be modified in a goal-dependent way without reducing the self-induced activity of the robot. We present three strategies for guided self-organization, namely by using external rewards, a problem-specific error function, or assumptions about the symmetries of the desired behavior. The strategies are analyzed for two different robots in a physically realistic simulation.
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