Self-Organization, Embodiment, and Biologically Inspired Robotics
Rolf Pfeifer,1*
Max Lungarella,1
Fumiya Iida1,2
Robotics researchers increasingly agree that ideas from biology
and self-organization can strongly benefit the design of autonomous
robots. Biological organisms have evolved to perform and survive
in a world characterized by rapid changes, high uncertainty,
indefinite richness, and limited availability of information.
Industrial robots, in contrast, operate in highly controlled
environments with no or very little uncertainty. Although many
challenges remain, concepts from biologically inspired (bio-inspired)
robotics will eventually enable researchers to engineer machines
for the real world that possess at least some of the desirable
properties of biological organisms, such as adaptivity, robustness,
versatility, and agility.
2 Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: pfeifer{at}ifi.uzh.ch
