Cybernetic Approaches to Robotics

Abstract

The term Cybernetics was coined by Norbert Wiener in 1948 in his book Cybernetics (Wiener, 1948), with the common view of a general science of control and communication in the animal and the machine. Communication means conveying information and control means to produce desired changes using the information. Cybernetics is the science that studies the principles of organisation in complex systems, in other words, systems that behave like living beings. Cybernetics focuses on how systems use information, models, and control actions to steer towards an optimal goal. Being inherently transdisciplinary, cybernetic reasoning can be used to understand, model and design systems of any kind: physical, technological, social, biological, ecological, psychological, and economical or any combination of these. Cybernetics had from the beginning an interested in the similarities between autonomous, living systems and machines (Heylighen and Joslyn, 2001). Therefore, a trend within this research community is to study the functional mechanisms of these autonomous and living systems and apply them to machines to make it autonomous or to behave like living systems.