Co-emergence of perception, action, and embodiment
Event details
| Date | 31.08.2016 |
| Hour | 14:00 |
| Speaker | Dr. Trish Nanayakkara, King’s College London |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
The emerging area of morphological computation views the body not only as a mere anatomical structure, but also as an important resource that contributes to the computation of perception and action. The nature of sensorimotor coupling and its implications on the very nature of computation of action-perception arbitration in soft robotics and biological motor control is not yet well understood. For instance, the spindle sensors (provide position and velocity) and tendons (provide force/torque) are physically embedded among muscle fibres. That makes sensing entangled with action, offering opportunities to take control over haptic perception by changing action and vice versa. E.g., when asked to estimate the weight of an object, one would hold the object and bob it up and down before arriving at a final estimate of the weight. Similarly, people probe several times when asked to mark a hard area in a soft object.
This opens up an unexplored question as to how internal impedance of the embodiment should be controlled to arbitrate perception and action as co-occurring phenomena rather than as a sequential phenomena where sensing conditions action. In other words, optimization of action and haptic perception has not been viewed as an integrated problem where one imposes constraints on the other while at the same time improving the other.
In this talk, I will show some results of the recent work in my “laboratory for morphological computation and learning” to suggest the benefit of viewing the whole body as a unified computational machine. I will also pose a hypothesis we have been developing recently about the possible connection from neural level plasticity to model the world and the body to long terms morphological adaptations such as the shape of the sliding surface of the knee joint whereby the resulting bodily adaptation releases the central nervous system from repetitive computation of control action via feedback loops with long delays.
Bio: Dr. Thrish Nanayakkara is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Robotics Research (CoRe), Department of Informatics, Kings College London (KCL). Thrish has been a Radcliffe Fellow, Harvard University, USA, and research affiliate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, USA. His research interests are in soft robotics and human-robot interaction. He has experience as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, USA.
This opens up an unexplored question as to how internal impedance of the embodiment should be controlled to arbitrate perception and action as co-occurring phenomena rather than as a sequential phenomena where sensing conditions action. In other words, optimization of action and haptic perception has not been viewed as an integrated problem where one imposes constraints on the other while at the same time improving the other.
In this talk, I will show some results of the recent work in my “laboratory for morphological computation and learning” to suggest the benefit of viewing the whole body as a unified computational machine. I will also pose a hypothesis we have been developing recently about the possible connection from neural level plasticity to model the world and the body to long terms morphological adaptations such as the shape of the sliding surface of the knee joint whereby the resulting bodily adaptation releases the central nervous system from repetitive computation of control action via feedback loops with long delays.
Bio: Dr. Thrish Nanayakkara is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Robotics Research (CoRe), Department of Informatics, Kings College London (KCL). Thrish has been a Radcliffe Fellow, Harvard University, USA, and research affiliate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, USA. His research interests are in soft robotics and human-robot interaction. He has experience as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, USA.
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Organizer
- NCCR Robotics
Contact
- Lirot Mayra <[email protected]>