Morphogenetic Robotics: An Emerging New Field in Developmental Robotics

—Developmental robotics is also known as epigenetic robotics. We propose in this paper that there is one substantial difference between developmental robotics and epigenetic robotics, since epigenetic robotics concentrates primarily on modeling the development of cognitive elements of living systems in robotic systems, such as language, emotion, and social skills, while developmental robotics should also cover the modeling of neural and morphological development in single- and multirobot systems. With the recent rapid advances in evolutionary developmental biology and systems biology, increasing genetic and cellular principles underlying biological morphogenesis have been revealed. These principles are helpful not only in understanding biological development, but also in designing self-organizing, self-reconfigurable, and self-repairable engineered systems. In this paper, we propose morphogenetic robotics, an emerging new field in developmental robotics, is an important part of dev...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: TSMC
• Authors: Yaochu Jin, Yan Meng
• Keywords: Developmental Robotics, Epigenetic Robotics, Robotics, TSMC 2011