Project AMARSI: Adaptive modular architecture for rich motor skills

2010-03-01 – 2014-02-28

Abstract

Compared to animals and humans, the motor skills of today's robots still must be qualified as poor. Their behavioral repertoire is typically limited to a narrow set of carefully engineered motor patterns that operate a rigid mechanics and lack situated adaptivity, learnability and dynamical fusion of motor primitives into complex, task-oriented be-havioral patterns.
The AMARSi integrated Project aims at a qualitative jump toward biological richness of robotic motor skills. By richness we mean the systemic integration of motor primitives into a large repertoir of mo-tor behavior, ranging across the entire hieracrchy from simple periodic and aperiodic motions to complex, task-oriented interaction sequences between a robot and a human caretaker. To achieve this goal, a number of innovative scientific concepts and interdisciplinary research methods will be implemented