Norihiro Maruyama

Fuji Machine (Japan), The University of Tokyo

Papers

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About

Norihiro Maruyama is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of robotics, artificial life, and embodied cognition. His work explores how autonomous systems—from humanoid robots to cultured neural networks—can generate lifelike, sense-making behaviors without explicit programming. In his highly cited 2021 study on the humanoid robot “Alter3,” Maruyama introduced a novel mechanism for personogenesis: the robot autonomously imitates human motion, stores sequences in memory, and uses a self-simulator to refine its actions, effectively “learning” to be more human-like. This work, with 17 citations, has become a touchstone for research on social robotics and behavioral emergence. Earlier, Maruyama broke new ground by using real cultured neuronal cells as robot controllers, demonstrating that sensorimotor coupling alone can drive the emergence of adaptive behavior—a finding with 15 citations that challenges conventional AI paradigms. His work on autonomous sensor networks (ASN) further extends these principles into open, real-world environments, creating “space-time affordances” that allow artificial systems to interact dynamically with their surroundings. Maruyama’s research is notable for its bold, interdisciplinary approach, blending neuroscience, robotics, and artificial life to ask fundamental questions about what it means for a machine to behave, adapt, and even “sense” its world.