The different research strands are all designed to contribute to our ultimate goals: understanding intelligence, developing a theory of intelligence, and realizing practical applications.

Motion, locomotion, and orientation
According to the British biologist Lewis Wolpert (who once said “Why do plants not have brains? The answer is actually quite simple, they don’t have to move”), the selectionist pressure on the development of nervous systems has come from the need to move, locomote, and orient in space. In this view, intelligence has emerged over evolutionary time on top of sensory-motor processes as agents have interacted with the real world. Understanding the biological principles underlying locomotion will not only lead to the construction of better, more natural-looking robots, but constitutes a prerequisite to understanding cognition and intelligence. We are developing a large variety of different robots for locomotion, walking, running, swimming, and flying (***link to “dynamics of locomotion” project, Matej and Marc***).

Learning, development, neural modeling
In order to understand human-level intelligence, we must understand how all the remarkable skills have come about. The field of developmental robotics which unites researchers from developmental psychology, artificial intelligence and robotics has a research agenda geared towards modeling increasingly complex cognitive processes in natural and artificial systems emerge to understand how such processes emerge through physical and social interaction. Often, humanoid robots are used as the research platforms – we are engaged in a several pertinent research activities (***link to RobotCub project***).

Self-organization, self-assembly, and modular robotics
Inspired by the notion of biological cells, whose behavior is largely grounded in processes of self-organization and self-assembly, modular robotics seeks to design systems capable of autonomous assembly and re-configuration. Given that much functionality can be outsourced to the morphology, the prospect of being able to build arbitrary structures with emergent functionality, is highly attractive. The issue of scalability is crucial since the mechanisms that are valid at the macroscopic level will most likely not be applicable at smaller scales (***link scalable self-assembly***).

Evolution of artificial cell
Cells which are the building blocks for natural organisms are capable, through cell differentiation and replication, to construct a mind-boggling variety of different structures and entire creatures. If we could achieve even a fraction of this ability, we could enormously expand the capacity of current robotics. This research strand aims at growing arbitrary structures using vesicle-like units as basic building blocks (***link to PACE, and Peter/Maik Hadorn***).

Artificial evolution and morphogenesis
Richard Dawkins has convincingly demonstrated that evolution, though entirely “blind” and without goals, is a gifted designer. While most approaches to evolutionary robotics start from a particular morphology and evolve the control, in Nature, brain and body have co-evolved. In order to take this co-evolution into account we have developed models of genetic regulatory networks to deal with growth during ontogenesis (***link to Peter’s and Gabriel’s project***).

Educational technologies
Modern concepts of intelligence like passive dynamics, distributed control, and self-assembly can hardly be realized using existing robotic toolkits such as Lego Mindstorms. We thus have started a new research strand focused on the development of a toolkit for schools and for artists. The toolkit’s goal, which is to teach and disseminate powerful ideas, has found wide international and national support in the research and educational communities (***link to the DREAM project Webpage***).

Applications: Prosthetics and neural interfacing
Dexterous hands for humanoid robots can also be used as prosthetic devices. One of our research strands concerns the development of assistive technologies for the physically challenged. Whenever humans make a movement of the hand, the whole body is involved, which is rarely taken into account when designing the control for hand prostheses. Moreover, although sensory feedback is absolutely crucial it has to date been rudimentary to say the least; a fact that we aim to change in the near future (***link to the Dynamical Coupling project***).

Art and design
Designing and building is our business. Both, designers and artists design and build – perhaps the kinds of artifacts they are interested in are somewhat different, but just as the roboticists, they are using different materials and often they employ software. Our experience with artists working in our laboratory in the context of the “Artists in Lab” program of the Swiss government has been extremely positive and inspiring for both the artists and the engineers. (***links to AIL, Andreas, Daniel, Pablo***).

Application to business design
Companies and other organizations can be viewed as intelligent systems – an idea that has been around for a long time. If this assumption is correct, it could make sense to view management as a design problem and to try and apply the design principles that we have worked out for embodied systems to building companies or businesses. This idea is illustrated in Chapter 9 of “How the body shapes the way we think” (***link to the book page***).