NOTE: The answers are listed in random order and in their original form (i.e., spelling and grammatical errors were not corrected). The students had the option of choosing their questions on this homework (5 out of 8) so not all students chose to answer this question.


In your own words describe what is developmental robotics? What is the main research hypothesis of this emerging field of robotics?

• "It's not what I expected but I like what I have seen so far."


• "Developmental robotics makes two assumptions simply from its title. First, using the word "robotics" instead of "artificial intelligence" means that the system is embodied, implying that the data being considered will be real world data, full of complexity and noise. "Developmental" supposes a changing, learning system and implies that the system starts as an "infant", with little preprogrammed knowledge. So, developmental robotics is the study of how embodied robotic systems use sensors and actuators in the real world to learn about and adapt to their environments.
  
  One reason that developmental robotics seems necessary is the tremendous complexity of the world. It may be possible to program responses for every situation imaginable, but the task is so daunting in scale that most alternatives seem appealing. The world is complex, but not so complex that we humans cannot make sense of it gradually as we age. Patterns, causes and effects, happen with detectable regularity and define our reality. These patterns can also be recognized by a robotic system, given the correct algorithm for learning."



• "Developmental robotics is about producing intelligent robots in a stepwise fashion much like the development of a child into fullblown human. The main principle of developmetal robotics is that of epigenesis (a.k.a. gradual evolution). One way to summarize it is: The only new things that you can learn are those that you almost already know."


• "Developmental Robotics is a new branch in robotics which incorporates principles from Developmental Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, and Robotics. The main goal of developmental robotics is creating general-purpose, task nonspecific autonomous agents that have an ability to learn and adapt to a (changing) environment through constant interaction with their surroundings.
  
  Researchers in the field attempt to build robots that are not pre-programmed, robots, for which motivation that drives robot's actions, fitness function, reinforcement signal, and verification should come from within/be performed by a system itself, and not supplied by humans.
  
  The main research hypothesis states that in order to achieve truly intelligent behavior, pre-programming robots to execute specific tasks is not enough. In addition, a robot must go through a learning stage, in which it should actively explore and interact with it environment. Having a developmental period is necessary for robots as well as for humans and animals."



• "Developmental robotics is simply another attempt at making smarter robots. It bridges many fields such as neuroscience, psychology, and computer science to gain an understanding of how learning and development occurs. The main idea behind developmental robotics is that robots must interact with, and adapt within, their environment much like intelligent beings do."



• "The goal is to create intelligent robots by allowing them to go through a development process with parallels to the human brain; to allow them to perceive the world and learn from it. Discovering from self-motivated actions instead of built and programmed for a specific action."



• "Developmental robotics is a field of robotics research dedicated to designing and building artificially intelligent robots. What separates it from other AI robotics research is its hypothesis that, in order to develop robots that are intelligent in the same way humans are intelligent, they will have to learn about the world the way humans do. This means that robots will have to undergo the same stages of development that human children do - thus the title of the field. The basic idea is that human intelligence is a very particular and peculiar thing. Mimicking it cannot be easily done through straightforward programming and problem solving. To make something intelligent the way we are intelligent it is much easier to design it to learn the way we learn, and then let it grow its own intelligence. This is the strategy developmental robotics employs in its effort to create artificially intelligent machines."



• "From my understanding, Developmental Robotics deals with the interactions of a robot with its environment over a period of time. If we want to build intelligent robots we should try to model the robot after something that is intelligent. By looking at anything intelligent you will see a developmental stage. In this time the intelligent being learns how it can interact with its environment by trial and error. There is no initial memory bank being used by the body, it only has its basic instinctive characteristics driving it. Applying this to robotics would mean you need to give a robot an operation code and let is learn from trial and error over time. I think the main research hypothesis for Developmental Robotics is that robots could become intelligent given a code allowing it to adapt and learn from its interactions with its environment."



• "Developmental robotics is designing robots with the ability to understand the outside world and to develop intelligence for their behaviors so the robot would be able to adapt to its environment with little programming. The main research hypothesis is to understand how the human brain works and apply it to robotics by having a robot programmed with a developmental program for the unknown and learn in real-time from humans for any task."



• "Developmental robotics is an offshoot of traditional robotics and AI that has drawn attention from researchers in many fields including, but not limited to computer science, computer engineering, and psychology. They premise that drives research in the field of Developmental Robotics is that truly intelligent behavior cannot be achieved in vacuum an intelligent robot must interact with other elements in an environment for some period of time before achieving a degree of intelligence that is useful. The field of developmental robotics, then, relies less on pre-programmed behavior and more on algorithms or models for learning, memory, and prediction."



• "To me, developmental robotics has to do with truly intelligent robots that just don't mimic certain behaviors of intelligence, but actually have some sort of understanding of the environment around them. I think the main hypothesis of robotics is that we can create truly intelligent machines that might not necessarily think the way we do, but can look at something the way we do and be able to pick out objects easily or hear someone speaking and be able to understand what they are saying by filling in the gaps and reading between the lines. You could also say it is teaching the English man in the Chinese Room how to speak fluent Chinese."



• "Developmental robotics aims to design scalable intelligent robots by enabling robots to developmentally adapt themselves to the environment. This is in contrast to the traditional hard-wired method, which sets up almost everything of the robot beforehand. The main research hypothesis is that truly intelligent robot behavior cannot be achieved in the absence of a prolonged interaction with a physical or social environment."



• "My first impression of "developmental robotics" was a multi-disciplinary field of, at least, robotics and machine learning. Basically, I have been impressed that developmental robotics concerns the research of robots that can learn new things."



• "Developmental robotics seeks to develop autonomous robots by using analogous developmental theories from developmental and cognitive psychology. The main research hypothesis of developmental robotics is that intelligent behaviors can only be attained by interacting with a physical or social environment."



• "Developmental Robotics is the study of the cognitive development of thinking agents within the context of an "embodiment" of the agent together with an "environment" and the interactions between the two. The main research hypothesis is that without a proper context for learning, cognitive processes will not develop appropriately. A grounding in actual spacial simulation is needed to give the learning a solid foundation."



• "Developmental robotics tries to build robotic intelligence by analogy with the developmental stages of human intelligence.
  
  The main hypothesis is that the hardness of the problem of making intelligent robots consists in finding the right sequence of lessons and support for understanding them."



• "Developmental robotics is the science or study of technology to design the robots through the knowledge of developmental psychology, neuroscience, robotics and artificial intelligence. People hope to design more autonomous robots through the studies of cognitive development. The main hypothesis is that intelligence can only be developed from the interaction with the physical (objects) or social (peers) environment. Development is an incremental process."



• "Developmental robotics is the study and implementation of intelligent robotic agents that acquire knowledge through interaction with the real world. Rather than spend time programming prior knowledge into robots, the focus is on building an entity with no prior knowledge but the ability to gain it on its own.
  
  The main hypothesis is that robots built in this way will be more adaptable to their environments and, thus, more effective. Whereas designing prior knowledge for a new robot requires a model of the robot s body, environment, and body-environment dynamics, a developmental robot should be able to adapt to any body and environment during its developmental phase, as long as there is predictable information to be learned."



• "Developmental robotics is the approach to designing machines capable of developing intellingence. That is, the machines may be initialized with certain behaviors and abilities; the goal is to design the machine with the perceptual and cognitive abilities to expand its "knowledge" of how to perform a task, or have it "figure out" how to solve a problem.
  
  The basic research hypothesis of developmental robotics is that truly intelligent behavior cannot be achieved without prolonged interaction with an environment. Much like humans learn by memory of experience with environments and situations, so must robots."

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