Predictive information and explorative behavior of autonomous robots

N. Ay, N. Bertschinger, R. Der (), F. Güttler and E. Olbrich

The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, 2008, vol. 63, issue 3, 329-339

Abstract: Measures of complexity are of immediate interest for the field of autonomous robots both as a means to classify the behavior and as an objective function for the autonomous development of robot behavior. In the present paper we consider predictive information in sensor space as a measure for the behavioral complexity of a two-wheel embodied robot moving in a rectangular arena with several obstacles. The mutual information (MI) between past and future sensor values is found empirically to have a maximum for a behavior which is both explorative and sensitive to the environment. This makes predictive information a prospective candidate as an objective function for the autonomous development of such behaviors. We derive theoretical expressions for the MI in order to obtain an explicit update rule for the gradient ascent dynamics. Interestingly, in the case of a linear or linearized model of the sensorimotor dynamics the structure of the learning rule derived depends only on the dynamical properties while the value of the MI influences only the learning rate. In this way the problem of the prohibitively large sampling times for information theoretic measures can be circumvented. This result can be generalized and may help to derive explicit learning rules from complexity theoretic measures. Copyright EDP Sciences/Società Italiana di Fisica/Springer-Verlag 2008

Keywords: 89.70.Cf Entropy and other measures of information; 87.19.lo Information theory; 87.85.St Robotics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1140/epjb/e2008-00175-0 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eurphb:v:63:y:2008:i:3:p:329-339

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10051

DOI: 10.1140/epjb/e2008-00175-0

Access Statistics for this article

The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems is currently edited by P. Hänggi and Angel Rubio

More articles in The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems from Springer, EDP Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().