Inna Mikhailova, Martin Heracles, Bram Bolder, Herbert Janßen, Holger Brandl, Jens Schmüdderich, Christian Goerick, "Coupling of mental concepts to a reactive layer: incremental approach in system design", Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics, Brighton, England, 2008.

The design of a system that bootstraps an open-ended development is one of the most intriguing questions in Developmental Robotics. Inspired by evolution we propose an incremental design. We start with a reactive layer that provides task-unspecific interaction with the environment. We extend this initial layer by a layer of multi-modal expectation generation. The two layers are coupled by means of an active resolution of expectation mismatches. Such an extension allows for the transition from reactive behavior to hypothesis testing and goal-directed behavior. The expectations can also be used as a teaching signal. The proposed architecture is validated on the example of multi-modal learning and evaluation of auditory labels tested on the humanoid robot Asimo.