title: Adaptivity through Physical Immaturity creator: Lungarella, Max creator: Berthouze, Luc subject: Machine Learning subject: Neural Nets subject: Artificial Intelligence subject: Robotics description: Given a neural control structure, what would be the impact of body growth on control performance? This question, which addresses the issue of the interaction between innate structure, ongoing developing structure and experience, is very relevant to the field of epigenetic robotics. Much of the early social interaction is done as the body develops and the interplay cannot be ignored. We hypothesize that starting with fewer degrees of freedom enables a more efficient exploration of the sensorimotor space, that results in multiple directions of stability. While not necessarily corresponding to optimal task performance, they will guide the coordination of additional degrees of freedom. These additional degrees of freedom then allow for optimal task performance as well as for more tolerance and adaptation to environmental interaction. We propose a simple case-study to validate our hypothesis and describe experiments with a small humanoid robot. publisher: Lund University Cognitive Studies contributor: Prince, Christopher G. contributor: Demiris, Yiannis contributor: Marom, Yuval contributor: Kozima, Hideki contributor: Balkenius, Christian date: 2002 type: Conference Paper type: PeerReviewed format: application/pdf identifier: http://cogprints.org/2516/1/Lungarella.pdf identifier: Lungarella, Max and Berthouze, Luc (2002) Adaptivity through Physical Immaturity. [Conference Paper] relation: http://cogprints.org/2516/