Bootstrapping Vehicles: A Formal Approach to Unsupervised Sensorimotor Learning Based on Invariance

Citation

Censi, Andrea (2013) Bootstrapping Vehicles: A Formal Approach to Unsupervised Sensorimotor Learning Based on Invariance. Dissertation (Ph.D.), California Institute of Technology. doi:10.7907/PWVS-2Q74. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:10282012-082208075

Abstract

Could a "brain in a jar" be able to control an unknown robotic body to which it is connected, and use it to achieve useful tasks, without any prior assumptions on the body's sensors and actuators? Other than of purely intellectual interest, this question is relevant to the medium-term challenges of robotics: as the complexity of robotics applications grows, automated learning techniques might reduce design effort and increase the robustness and reliability of the solutions. In this work, the problem of "bootstrapping" is studied in the context of the Vehicles universe, which is an idealization of simple mobile robots, after the work of Braitenberg. The first thread of results consists in analyzing such simple sensorimotor cascades and proposing models of varying complexity that can be learned from data. The second thread regards how to properly formalize the notions of "absence of assumptions", as a particular form of invariance that the bootstrapping agent must satisfy, and proposes some invariance-based design techniques.

Thesis Files