An Ontogenetic Perspective to Scaling Sensorimotor Intelligence
Much of the work in autonomous agent design has been heavily inspired and in uenced by biological systems. Researchers strive to build arti cial systems that emulate the robust, exible, and adaptive behavior of animals. In particular, the behavior-based approach (Brooks 1991) has adopted many of its key models, metaphors, and concepts from the elds of ethology, neuroscience, and evolutionary theory to name a few. Looking to animals to glean insight into how to build intelligent autonomous systems, the eld has brought the issues of embodiment, situatedness, emergence, task-based decomposition, and environmental complexity to the foreground (Brooks & Steels 1995). Indeed, the treatment of these issues characterizes various biologically-inspired approaches, several of which have been successfully applied to the control of autonomous robots|behavior based systems (Brooks 1986), evolution-based systems (Cli et al. 1993), and connectionist systems (Beer 1990), for instance. To date, the behavior of these systems mirrors that of simpler organisms, such as insects, situated in relatively complex environments. Wishing to move beyond the behavior of insects and other simple animals, researchers question the scalability of these approaches and heavily debate how far systems using these approaches can be pushed. Often the question of scaling is posed in the context of increasing either environmental complexity or task complexity. Implicit in this question is that of cognitive scaling, i.e., can the intelligence of these physically embodied systems approach that of higher-level animals such as dogs, dolphins, primates, and humans? If this is the case, what roles could embodiment, situatedness, emergence, environmental complexity, or having a task-based view play in scaling cognitive and behavioral capabilities of arti cial and natural systems? In contrast to many autonomous agent programs that are shaped by an evolutionary or ethological perspective, we propose a research program that pursues an ontogenetic path. We argue that the eld of developmental psychology gives fresh insight into the issues of cognitive and behavioral scaling. It o ers a viable alternate viewpoint from which to study embodiment, situatedness, emergence, environmental complexity, and goal-oriented action in the world, illuminating the critical roles they may play in bootstrapping a child to more sophisticated levels of mental competence. Our contention is that a developmental perspective to autonomous agent design profoundly a ects the implemented control architecture, mechanisms, subsystems, and internal structures in ways which distinguish an ontogenetic system from other learning-based systems.