ShanghAI Lectures: Josh Bongard “Resilient Machines”

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2009-11-19

If the body plays a central role in intelligence, as a roboticist, how do we choose an appropriate body for our robot? Evolutionary robotics allows us to automatically optimize the physical layout of our robots as we also optimize their controllers. In this talk I will demonstrate how selecting or evolving an appropriate robot body can (1) simplify control, (2) make seemingly difficult tasks easier, (3) increase evolvability, (4) provide new behaviors, (5) facilitate the extraction of information from the environment, (6) generate new research questions, and (7) improve scalability.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence run by Rolf Pfeifer and organized by me and partners around the world.

The ShanghAI lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Nathan Labhart Co-organizing the ShanghAI Lectures since 2009.

Nathan Labhart Co-organizing the ShanghAI Lectures since 2009.