A Consideration of the Biological and Psychological Foundations of Autonomous Robotics

The new wave of robotics aims to provide robots with the capacity to learn, develop and evolve in interaction with their environments using biologically inspired techniques. This work is placed in perspective by considering its biological and psychological basis with reference to some of the grand theorists of living systems. In particular, we examine what it means to have a body by outlining theories of the mechanisms of bodily integration in multicellular organisms and their means of solidarity with the environment. We consider the implications of not having a living body for current ideas on robot learning, evolution, and cognition and issue words of caution about wishful attributions that can smuggle more into observations of robot behaviour than is scientifically supportable. To round off the arguments we take an obligatory swipe at ungrounded artificial intelligence but quickly move on to assess physical grounding and embodiment in terms of the rooted cognition of the living.