A brief overview of morpho-functional machines will be presented (F. Almeida e Costa). A mini-talk by Eric Vaughan, on his 6 legged Mars rover being developed for the European Space Agency (ESA), will follow suit. (details on Eric's project here: http://www.droidlogic.com/ )

This will be a 1h 30 min session, so there will be a lot of time for discussion.
It will comprise two distinct but complimentary sides: a technical one, mainly based on Eric's project and a conceptual/philosophical one on general principles underlying the concept of morpho-functional machines, as originally proposed in Kawai,N. and Hara,F.(1998): Formation of morphology and morpho-function in a linear-cluster robotic system (Proc. of SAB'98).

Generally speaking MFM are machines that change their morphology while performing a task, the changes allowing them to perform different functions.

Below, some material on MFM or conceptually related work. Papers 1, 3 and 4 will provide the main basis for discussion:

1. Kawai,N. and Hara,F.(1998): Formation of morphology and morpho-function in a linear-cluster robotic system. (From Animals to Animats, Proc. of 5th Int. Conf. SAB'98).

2. Bongard, J. (2003, unpublished) Incremental Approaches to the Combined Evolution of a Robot's Body and Brain (PhD Thesis). Can be found in Bongard's webpage:
http://www.mae.cornell.edu/bongard/

3. Pfeifer, R. (1999) Dynamics, Morphology, and Materials in the Emergence of Cognition (available through Citeseer)

4. Articles by Akio Ishiguro et al and by Hiroaki Hirai et al, here:
http://www.kimura.is.uec.ac.jp/amam2003/online-proceedings.html

Related work:

Check Eric Vaughan's page: http://www.droidlogic.com/

Harvey,I., Vaughan, E., Di Paolo, E.(224) Time and Motion Studies: The Dynamics of Cognition, Computation and Humanoid Walking www.cogs.sussex.ac.uk/users/inmanh/HART2004_Harvey_etal.pdf
 

activate.d Workshop on Dynamical Systems approach to Life and Cognition

Wednesday 23rd February 2005 | 1pm | PEV1 2A12

Ian Macinnes on "The Functional Circle Hypothesis"

Wednesday 9th February 2005 | 1pm | PEV1 2A12

Conceptual clarification of "dynamical modelling"
Concepts like digital computers, computation, physical dynamics, dynamical systems, abstract/concrete systems, held a relation among them with implications in dynamical modelling of cognitive activity, e.g. instantiation, realization, simulation, and so on. A clarification of the use of all these concepts should prevent future discussions being haunted by them. You can find the reading material to be discussed here.

Mainly, we will focus on Gelder's target article "The Dynamical Hypothesis in Cognitive Science" and his response to criticisms "Disentangling dynamics, computation, and cognition". The articles and some criticisms will be presented, before the discussion. During the presentation we'll try to complement and update the articles' content with some recent technical evidence.

Monday 24th January 2005 | 5pm | Pev1 2A2

We will start this term's meetings with an exchange on the topics of interest that the members of the group would like to have discussed.

So if you can, bring forth a topic or paper(s) that you would like to have discussed in the group. If you want you can present a very short description of the topic or the paper's content, or you can just refer it.

Monday 6th of December 2004

We propose the following paper to be discussed:
1) Beer, R.D. (1995). A dynamical systems perspective on agent-environment interaction. Artificial Intelligence 72:173-215.
2) Beer, R.D. (2003). The dynamics of active categorical perception in an evolved model agent. Adaptive Behavior 11(4):209-243.

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Monday 29th 2004 (CHI3-3R143)

Speaker: Chrisantha Fernando
Title: A Soufflé of life, a Mars bar of tar [abstract]

First meeting - Monday 22nd November 2004

Meet the group, share interests