Developmental Robotics (DevRob), sometimes called epigenetic robotics, is a methodology that uses metaphors from developmental psychology to develop controllers for autonomous robots. The focus is on a single robot going through stages of autonomous mental development. Researchers in this field study artificial emotions, self-motivation, and other methods of self-organization. Epigenetic Robotics is an interdiciplinary research area with the goal of understanding biological systems by the integration between neuroscience, developmental psychology and engineering sciences. ... Hans Baldung Grien: The Ages And Death, c. ... A controller is a person or device that exercises or attempts to exercise control or influence. ... Autonomous robots are robots which can perform desired tasks in unstructured environments without continuous human guidance. ...

DevRob is related to, but differs from, evolutionary robotics (ER). ER uses populations of robots that evolve over time, whereas DevRob is interested in the organization of a single robot's control system develops through experience, over time. This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ...

DevRob is also related to work done in the domains of Robotics, Artificial Life. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with robot. ... Artificial life, also known as alife or a-life, is the study of life through the use of human-made analogs of living systems. ...

History

DevRob was first proposed with Weng et. al.s Autonomous mental development by robots and animals. Science 291:599 600.

The first undergraduate courses in DevRob were offered at Bryn Mawr College and Swarthmore College in the Spring of 2003 by Douglas Blank and Lisa Meeden, respectively. Bryn Mawr is also the name of an official neighborhood of the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota. ... Swarthmore College is a private liberal arts college in the United States, with an enrollment of about 1450 students. ...

The first graduate course in DevRob was offered at Iowa State University by Alexander Stoytchev in the Fall of 2005. Fountain of Four Seasons by Christian Petersen with the Campanile in the background Iowa State University (ISU) is a public land-grant and space-grant university located in Ames, Iowa. ...

Links and further Information

Academic institutions and researchers in the field

• Michigan State University -- Embodied Intelligence Lab: http://www.cse.msu.edu/ei
• Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris: http://www.csl.sony.fr/Research/Topics/DevelopmentalRobotics/
• University of Tokyo -- Intelligent Systems and Informatics Lab: http://www.isi.imi.i.u-tokyo.ac.jp/
• LIRA-Lab, University of Genova, Italy: http://www.liralab.it
• The University of Texas at Austin, UTCS Intelligent Robotics Lab: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/qr/robotics/bootstrap-learning.html
• RobotCub Project: A 5 years European founded project to study cognition with a robot like a two years old child
• Bryn Mawr College's Developmental Robotics Project: research projects by faculty and students at Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr Colleges, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Michigan State University (MSU) is a public university in East Lansing, Michigan. ... Bryn Mawr is also the name of an official neighborhood of the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota. ...

Main Conferences

• International Conference on Development and Learning ICDL: http://icdl.cc/
• Epigentic Robotics: http://www.epigenetic-robotics.org/
• Developmental Robotics: http://cs.brynmawr.edu/DevRob05/

Blogs and Other Links

• Developing Intelligence: http://develintel.blogspot.com
• Developmental Robotics: http://developmentalrobotics.org : general information about developmental robotics