Workshop on Motor Development

5th April 2006

part of

AISB'06: Adaptation in Artificial and Biological Systems

University of Bristol, Bristol, England

The motor activity of an organism is one of its primary means of interacting with, and operating on, its environment. As such, its development is key to its cognitive development and, indeed, developmental psychology has shown both processes to be tightly coupled.

In embodied robotics and cognitive modeling, however, these processes have been mostly treated in isolation with systems either evolving higher cognitive processes, or acquiring new motor skills. The motivation of this symposium is that understanding, and simulating, the mechanisms underlying motor development is necessary to implement an ecologically-balanced development of the system.

This interdisciplinary symposium aims to bring together researchers from neuroscience, developmental psychology, computer science and robotics to examine the latest advances in the area, and delineate new strategies.


Program

09:00 Registration
09:30 Workshop keynote
The coordination of eye and head movements during visual tracking in human infants:
an example of u-shaped developmental function
C. von Hofsten and K. Rosander (Sweden)
10:45 Active learning of probabilistic forward models in visuo-motor development
A. Dearden and Y. Demiris (UK)
11:30 Coffee break
12:00 Robot bouncing: The assembly, tuning, and transfer of action systems
L. Berthouze (Japan)
12:45 Experimental comparison of the van der Pol and Rayleigh nonlinear oscillators for a robotic swinging task
P. Veskos and Y. Demiris (UK)
13:30 Lunch break -- SSAISB AGM
14:30 Adaptive combination of motor primitives
F. Nori, G. Metta, L. Jamone, and G. Sandini (Italy)
15:10 A procedural learning mechanism for novel skill acquisition
S. D'Mello, U. Ramamurthy, A. Negatu and S. Franklin (USA)
15:50 Is a kinematics model a prerequisite to robot imitation?
B. Jansen (Belgium)
16:30 Coffee break
17:00 AISB plenary talk
From individual to collective intelligence
Nigel Franks (UK)


Organiser

Luc Berthouze, AIST Neuroscience Research Institute, Japan.

Program Committee