An Ethological Analysis of Developmental Behavior in Machines

Value systems are central to behavior development in machines. Although this is a known conjecture in autonomous agents and developmental robotics, how exactly value systems emerge and drive new behavior is not well understood. As anatomy and physiology alone cannot explain human behavior, system architectures and algorithms do not fully define the behavior of machines that autonomously learn and acquire new skills. To understand and explain what drives machines to develop new behavior, this article applies ethological analyses to derive principled explanations to not only the “how” question on mechanisms but also the “why” question on causation of behavior development. By using a minimally configured mobile robot, this article describes and demonstrates why and how innate and circumstantial value systems drive successive development in memory functions, promoting the process of interpreting and manipulating inherently meaningful signals, signs, and symbols. The internal development of memory functions results in progressive changes in machine behavior from self-exploratory and innate reflex to episodic, procedural, autonomic, and ultimately conceptual and social behavior. This article explains by demonstration what it means for machines to be autonomous and developmental, clarifying the age-old problems of intrinsic motivation and symbol emergence in self-governing apparatus.