Ongoing Emergence: A Core Concept in Epigenetic Robotics



1983). We take this position because the amount of
interaction between the components will be limited and
because the components show limited development. This
provides another way to view the Section 5 alternatives:
ongoing emergence through separate modules versus
ongoing emergence through “modules” that develop.

It seems crucial to establish methodological ways to
achieve research progress in ongoing emergence. While
we have implicitly offered some ideas to this end in the
body of the paper, three further ideas come to mind. First,
it seems conceptually possible that ongoing emergence
could be exhibited strictly within particular domains. For
example, a robot might exhibit ongoing emergence only
in its language and communication skills, or only in its
object manipulation skills. Second, it also seems
conceptually possible that ongoing emergence may be
achieved in a primarily perceptual manner. We feel
justified in part for this statement by the productivity of
psychological methods with infants that have focused
largely on the development of perceptual knowledge
(e.g., Baillargeon, 1995; Hollich et al., 2000). Third, a
potentially useful research step towards a full sense of
ongoing emergence may be a linear emergence of a
limited number of skills. In this case, a
single skill would
emerge, that skill would then be incorporated into the
robot’s existing skill repertoire, and then this new pool of
skills would be used to develop
one additional skill.

In closing, we recollect the statements of Gyorgy
Gergely, in his invited address at EpiRob 2003. Gyorgy
suggested that “recent research in epigenetic robotics has
been strongly preoccupied with and [has] made
significant advances towards modeling the ‘lower level’
mechanisms and ‘bottom-up’ processes involved in
systems of action perception and production and the ways
in which these systems [may be] inherently interrelated”
(p. 192, Gergely, 2003). Clearly, with goals including
modeling cognitive development, epigenetic robotics
should not be limited to modeling ‘lower level’
mechanisms. But, how do we make progress? In the
terms of this paper, we advocate directly tackling the
challenge of ongoing emergence, and in particular our
Criterion 2 (incorporation of skills) seems in most need
of further research. If cognitive skills arise out of ongoing
emergence, then if we achieve robots with ongoing
emergence, there is a good chance that those robots will
have instantiated models of cognitive skills.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Lakshmi Gogate, Rich Maclin, and
Eric Mislivec for discussions and comments. A
discussion with John Weng started this paper. CGP
thanks his Spring05 CS5541 class for discussions about
some of the papers reviewed here. We thank the
EpiRob05 anonymous referees for constructive feedback.

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