Morphological Computation: Connecting Brain, Body, and Environment

Abstract

Traditionally, in robotics, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience, there has been a focus on the study of the control or the neural system itself. Recently there has been an increasing interest into the notion of embodiment not only in robotics and artificial intelligence, but also in the neurosciences, psychology, and philosophy. In this paper, we introduce the notion of morphological computation and demonstrate how it can be exploited on the one hand for designing intelligent, adaptive robotic systems, and on the other for understanding natural systems. While embodiment has often been used in its trivial meaning, i.e. "intelligence requires a body", the concept has deeper and more important implications, concerned with the relation between physical and information (neural, control) processes. Behavior is not the result of brain processes only, but there is a "task distribution" among brain processes (control), morphology, and materials. For example, the positioning of the sensors on the agent, the particular morphology (the anatomy), and the material properties of the muscle-tendon system (the biomechanical constraints) can be exploited for generating adaptive behavior. Morphological computation is about connecting brain, body, and environment (e.g. Pfeifer, et al., 2005, Pfeifer and Gomez, 2005, and Pfeifer and Bongard, 2005).