Taming the Beast: Guided Self-organization of Behavior in Autonomous Robots

Self-organizing processes are crucial for the development of living beings. Practical applications in robots may benefit from the selforganization of behavior, e.g. for the increased fault tolerance and enhanced flexibility provided that external goals can also be achieved. We present several methods for the guidance of self-organizing control by externally prescribed criteria. We show that the degree of self-organized explorativity of the robot can be regulated and that problem-specific error functions, hints, or abstract symbolic descriptions of a goal can be reconciled with the continuous robot dynamics.