On the interplay between morphological, neural, and environmental dynamics: A robotic case study

The robust and adaptive behavior exhibited by natural organisms is the result of a complex interaction between various plastic mechanisms acting at different time scales. So far, researchers have concentrated on one or another of these mechanisms, but little has been done toward integrating them into a unified framework and studying the result of their interplay in a real-world environment. In this article, we present experiments with a small humanoid robot that learns to swing. They illustrate that the exploitation of neural plasticity, entrainment to physical dynamics, and body growth (where each mechanism has a specific time scale) leads to a more efficient exploration of the sensorimotor space and eventually to a more adaptive behavior. Such a result is consistent with observations in developmental psychology.