Developmental Programming and Distributed Robot Control

The Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics at UMass Amherst is studying how sensors and effectors can be recruited into working robot systems using an idea we call the "control basis." This framework provides a convenient representation for combining distributed resources into integrated machines that can dissociate once their task is completed. Perhaps surprisingly, we feel this representation has a lot to do with the cognitive organization of development and dexterous behavior in biological systems as well. This talk introduces the control basis and creates a computational account of developmental processes that can be used to help robots write...