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Science 16 November 2007:
Vol. 318. no. 5853, pp. 1088 - 1093
DOI: 10.1126/science.1145803
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Review

Self-Organization, Embodiment, and Biologically Inspired Robotics

Rolf Pfeifer,1* Max Lungarella,1 Fumiya Iida1,2

Robotics researchers increasingly agree that ideas from biology and self-organization can strongly benefit the design of autonomous robots. Biological organisms have evolved to perform and survive in a world characterized by rapid changes, high uncertainty, indefinite richness, and limited availability of information. Industrial robots, in contrast, operate in highly controlled environments with no or very little uncertainty. Although many challenges remain, concepts from biologically inspired (bio-inspired) robotics will eventually enable researchers to engineer machines for the real world that possess at least some of the desirable properties of biological organisms, such as adaptivity, robustness, versatility, and agility.

1 Department of Informatics, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
2 Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: pfeifer{at}ifi.uzh.ch

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