The Dynamic Approach to Anthropomorphic Robotics

The ultimate task for today’s autonomous robots is the problem of man-machine interaction. This task sets high standards with respect to flexibility, stability, safety and efficiency of the generated robot behavior. We present a control architecture which is capable of both: the generation and organization of stable elementary behaviors based on low-level sensor information and the implementation of cognitive concepts like memory, internal simulation and learning. Based on the so-called Dynamic Approach to Robotics our approach tries to mimic the basic working principles of nervous systems of biological organisms. Pushing the parallels to biology even further we restrict ourselves to so-called anthropomorphic robots which have similarities with the human concerning the external body form and the sensor equipment. Copyright Controlo 2000