Adaptive modular architecture for rich motor skills (AMARSi)

Compared to animals and humans, the motor skills of today's robots still must be qualified as poor. Their behavioral repertoire is typically limited to a narrow set of carefully engineered motor patterns that operate a rigid mechanics and lack situated adaptivity, learnability and dynamical fusion of motor primitives into complex, task-oriented be-havioral patterns.
The AMARSi integrated Project aims at a qualitative jump toward biological richness of robotic motor skills. By richness we mean the systemic integration of motor primitives into a large repertoir of mo-tor behavior, ranging across the entire hieracrchy from simple periodic and aperiodic motions to complex, task-oriented interaction sequences between a robot and a human caretaker. To achieve this goal, a number of innovative scientific concepts and interdisciplinary research methods will be implemented