Bio-Inspired Robotics

Modern robotic technologies have enabled robots to operate in a variety of unstructured and dynamically-changing environments, in addition to traditional structured environments. Robots have, thus, become an important element in our everyday lives. One key approach to develop such intelligent and autonomous robots is to draw inspiration from biological systems. Biological structure, mechanisms, and underlying principles have the potential to provide new ideas to support the improvement of conventional robotic designs and control. Such biological principles usually originate from animal or even plant models, for robots, which can sense, think, walk, swim, crawl, jump or even fly. Thus, it is believed that these bio-inspired methods are becoming increasingly important in the face of complex applications. Bio-inspired robotics is leading to the study of innovative structures and computing with sensory–motor coordination and learning to achieve intelligence, flexibility, stability, and adaptation for emergent robotic applications, such as manipulation, learning, and control. This Special Issue invites original papers of innovative ideas and concepts, new discoveries and improvements, and novel applications and business models relevant to the selected topics of ``Bio-Inspired Robotics''. Bio-Inspired Robotics is a broad topic and an ongoing expanding field. This Special Issue collates 30 papers that address some of the important challenges and opportunities in this broad and expanding field

Improving Scalability of Evolutionary Robotics with Reformulation

Creating systems that can operate autonomously in complex environments is a challenge for contemporary engineering techniques. Automatic design methods offer a promising alternative, but so far they have not been able to produce agents that outperform manual designs. One such method is evolutionary robotics. It has been shown to be a robust and versatile tool for designing robots to perform simple tasks, but more challenging tasks at present remain out of reach of the method. In this thesis I discuss and attack some problems underlying the scalability issues associated with the method. I present a new technique for evolving modular networks. I show that the performance of modularity-biased evolution depends heavily on the morphology of the robot’s body and present a new method for co-evolving morphology and modular control. To be able to reason about the new technique I develop reformulation framework: a general way to describe and reason about metaoptimization approaches. Within this framework I describe a new heuristic for developing metaoptimization approaches that is based on the technique for co-evolving morphology and modularity. I validate the framework by applying it to a practical task of zero-g autonomous assembly of structures with a fleet of small robots. Although this work focuses on the evolutionary robotics, methods and approaches developed within it can be applied to optimization problems in any domain

An investigation of multiple natural origins of religion

This study attempts to trace how religion could have originated in prehistory and antiquity, out of natural human and prehuman behaviour, without requiring the reality of the supernatural.Religion is here defined as beliefs, conceptions, practices and roles concerned with the putative supernatural. A variety of manifestations or elements of religious belief and practice can be identified. It is proposed that they have separate origins. Examples of religious elements are: life after death, ghosts, sacrifice, priests, shamans, gods, demons, .... It is argued that to try to reduce religion to one original element is a mistake. There may be no single origin. But the individual elements have origins, and plausible theories can account for each.Using theories and insights of previous workers, elaborated as necessary with information from a range of sciences, arguments are presented to account for five major foundational religious elements, thereby illustrating and partly fulfilling what is potentially a much wider programme. The elements covered are: (1) Animatism: numina, daemons; (2) Animism: ghosts, souls; (3) Another world: life after death; (4) Another world: heaven; (5) Religious specialists: shamans.Chapter 1 introduces the programme. Chapter 2 sets out definitions, philosophical principles and methodologyChapter 3 explores the specifically numinous quality which characterizes the supernatural in subjective experience. Chapter 4 describes brain structures and the neural substrate of experience. Chapter 5 proposes specific neurological hypotheses to account for certain types of numinous or `supernatural' experience.Chapter 6 deals with ape mentality, which may be presumed to characterize that of our remote ancestors, and identifies precursors of religious elements.Chapters 7 - 11 deal with the possibly separate origin of five major religious elements, as listed above.Chapter 12 summarizes the investigation, attempts to place the elements covered in sequence of their development in prehistory and antiquity, and expresses the limitations of the theory constructed