Have you ever thrown sticks and stones in the water as a
child, just to find out whether they would float or not? Or have you
ever noticed how much fun babies can have by simply touching objects,
sticking them into their mouths, or rattling them and discovering new
noises? It is these “embodied” interactions, experiences and
discoveries – and not only the organization of our brain – that
together result in intelligence. During the past five years,
Pierre-Yves Oudeyer and Frederic Kaplan have been working on algorithms
that make robots “eager” to investigate their surroundings.
Curiosity-driven robots explore their environment in search of new
things to learn: they get bored with situations that are already
familiar to them, and also avoid situations in which nothing can be
learned. In our experiments, we place the robots in a world that is
rich in learning opportunities and then just watch how the robots
develop by themselves. The results show relevant analogies with the
ways in which young children discover their own bodies as well as the
people and objects that are close to them.
Key Experiments
AIBO's playroom
The playground experiment
Selected Publications
Kaplan, F. and Oudeyer, P-Y (2007) In search of the
neural circuits of intrinsic motivation, Frontiers in Neuroscience, 1
(1), 225-236
Oudeyer, P.-Y., Kaplan, F., Hafner, V.V. (2007),
Intrinsic Motivation Systems for Autonomous Mental Development, IEEE
Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 11 (1)
Oudeyer P-Y. and Kaplan F. (2006) Discovering communication, Connection Science, 18(2)
Kaplan, F. et Oudeyer, P-Y (2006) Un robot curieux, Pour La Science, 348, p. 32-39
Selected Videos
Selected Press
Sony researchers create 'curious' Aibos / IDG / 06.2005
Robo-pups created with curiostiy in mind / New Scientist / 06.2005
Pourquoi les roboticiens de Sony apprennent à AIBO a faire des betises / Agefi / 04.2005
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