Contingency as a Motor for Robot Development

Contents

Though being an essential aspect of animal evolution, contingency was never considered in building robots. The goal of this paper is to claim that the notion of contingency is yet necessary to understand the particular nature of "embodied" artificial systems (robots) vs. "disembodied" ones (symbolic or simulated systems). "embodied system", we mean a system which is in sensori-motor interaction with a natural environment.