The Playground Experiment: Task-Independent Development of a Curious Robot

This paper presents the mechanism of Intelligent Adaptive Curiosity. This is an intrinsic motivation system which pushes the robot towards situations in which it maximizes its learning progress. It makes the robot focus on situations which are neither too predictable nor too unpredictable. This mechanism is a source of autonomous mental development for the robot: the complexity of its activities autonomously increases and a developmental sequence appears without being manually constructed. We test this motivation system on a real robot which evolves on a baby playmat with objects that it can learn to manipulate. We show that it first spends time in situations which are easy to learn, then shifts progressively its attention to situations of increasing difficulty, avoiding situations in which nothing can be learnt. The challenge of autonomous mental