ABSTRACT
In order to understand the emergence of cognition, we cannot limit our investigations to control architectures only, but we must include considerations on physical growth, change of shape, and body composition, which are salient characteristics of maturation. Due to the current state of technology we cannot have physically growing robots, therefore we propose a method to “simulate” development at the level of the sensory, motor, and neural systems. We use a high-resolution sensory system and a high-precision motor system with a large number of mechanical degrees of freedom, but we start out by simulating, in software, lower resolution sensors (e.g. by averaging over neighboring pixels in the camera image, or by using a few pressure sensors) and lower precision motor system (e.g., by adding noise), and an increased “controllability’ (e.g., by freezing most degrees of freedom). Over time, we gradually increase the resolution of the sensors and the precision of the motors by successively freeing these “degrees of freedom” (e.g. by starting to use the “frozen” joints).
