Quantifying Morphological Computation

TL;DR

This paper formalizes the concept of morphological computation in embodied intelligence, proposing measures to quantify how morphology and environment influence an agent's behavior, validated through experiments.

Contribution

It introduces two formal measures of morphological computation and explores their relation to the Information Bottleneck Method, advancing understanding in embodied intelligence.

Findings

Two measures of morphological computation are proposed.

The measures are validated through two experiments.

The strengths and weaknesses of the measures are discussed.

Abstract

The field of embodied intelligence emphasises the importance of the morphology and environment with respect to the behaviour of a cognitive system. The contribution of the morphology to the behaviour, commonly known as morphological computation, is well-recognised in this community. We believe that the field would benefit from a formalisation of this concept as we would like to ask how much the morphology and the environment contribute to an embodied agent's behaviour, or how an embodied agent can maximise the exploitation of its morphology within its environment. In this work we derive two concepts of measuring morphological computation, and we discuss their relation to the Information Bottleneck Method. The first concepts asks how much the world contributes to the overall behaviour and the second concept asks how much the agent's action contributes to a behaviour. Various measures are derived from the concepts and validated in two experiments which highlight their strengths and weaknesses.