Self-organization of behavior in autonomous robot development

I am studying the question how robots can autonomously develop skills. Considering children, it seems natural that they have their own agenda. They explore their environment in a playful way, without the necessity for somebody to tell them what to do next. With robots the situation is different. There are many methods to let robots learn to do something, but it is always about learning to do a specific task from a supervision signal. Unfortunately, these methods do not scale well to systems with many degrees of freedom, except a good prestructuring is available. The hypothesis is that if the robots first learn to use their bodies and interact with the environment in a playful way they can acquire many small skills with which they can later solve complicated tasks much quicker. In the talk I will present my steps into this direction. Starting from some general information theoretic consideration we provide robots with an own drive to do something and explore their behavioral capabilities. Technically this is achieved by considering the sensorimotor loop as a dynamical system, whose parameters are adapted online according to a gradient ascent on an approximated information quantity. I will show examples of simulated and real robots behaving in a self-determined way and present future directions of my research.