Embodied Cognition and Robotics
A few relevant publications (for downloadable
pdf-files, check here)
Seth, A., Sporns, O. and Krichmar, J. (2005) Neurorobotic models in neuroscience and neuroinformatics. Neuroinformatics 3, 167-170.
Lungarella, M.,
Pegors, T., Bulwinkle, D., and Sporns, O. (2005) Methods for
quantifying the
informational structure of sensory and motor data.
Neuroinformatics 3, 243-262.
Alexander,
W.H., and Sporns, O. (2004) Interactions of environment, behavior, and
synaptic
patterns in a neuro-robotic model. In:
From Animals to Animats 8, Proceedings SAB 2004, Schaal, S, Ijspeert,
A.,
Billard, A., Vijayakumar, S., Hallam, J., and Meyer, J.-A. (eds.),
pp.13-22,
MIT Press,
Sporns,
O., and Alexander, W.H. (2003) Neuromodulation in a learning robot:
interactions between neural plasticity and behavior. Proceedings IJCNN
2003,
2789-2794.
Sporns, O. (2002) Embodied Cognition. In: MIT Handbook of Brain
Theory and Neural Networks, M. Arbib, Ed., MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Sporns, O., and
Alexander, W.H. (2002)
Neuromodulation and plasticity in an autonomous robot. Neural
Networks.
Sporns, O., and
Alexander, W.H. (2002)
Dopamine, reward conditioning, and robot behavior. ICDL02.
Alexander, W.H., and Sporns, O. (2002) Timed delivery of reward signals in an autonomous robot. In: Animals to Animats 7: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, pp. 195-204, Hallam, B., Floreano, D., Hallam, J., Hayes, G. and Meyer, J.-A. (Editors), MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.
Weng, J.,
McClelland, J., Pentland, A., Sporns, O., Stockman, I., Sur, M.,
Thelen, E. (2001) Autonomous mental development by robots and
animals. Science 291:599-600.
Movies and other materials related to
embodiment and information (coming soon...)
[...]
Movies of robot behavior (1.4 Mb each):
These are short mpegs of Monad as it approaches different kinds of objects. For a detailed description of the robot, the neural model and the results, see Sporns and Alexander (2002), or Alexander and Sporns (2002).
The first movie segment shows the robot approaching and "tasting" a red (appetitive) object. - download
This movie clip shows the robot's behavior when encountering a blue (aversive) object. Note that the object is dropped as soon as the taste signal is received. - download
This movie clip shows how the robot's behavior has changed with learning. Now, the color of the object has become proedictive of the aversive taste and, consequently, the avoidance response is triggered by the visual input alone. - download
Downloadable Matlab/linux functions for serial line communication with khepera robots:
These scripts are used in our work to send serial line commands to and receive data from khepera robots, via a standard 9600 baud serial line, under Linux RedHat 7.2 and Matlab 6.0. They were modified from similar scripts written by Mathias Grimrath for Sun/Solaris.
Probably, you will need to "mex" the .c
functions and go from there. Also, the serial port you're using
(/dev/ttya or /dev/ttyb) will need to be write-enabled. Here is a
simple little Matlab script that shows you how the commands work:
Khepera robots are built by
k-team: http://www.k-team.com/