Hyper
For a physical robot its definately useful to have the outputs from whatever adaptive system is being used put through a checking routine to ensure that the desired servo positions won't cause the robot to be damaged.
The ability to have the feature space expand or contract depending on the dimensionality of the sensory input received by the robot would certainly be an advantage. One problem with using a SOM type system is that according to the classical algorithm the system gradually moves into an equilibrium state (learning rate and neighbourhood size gradually reducing at some fixed rate) until a solution of some sort is reached. Of course in the real world living systems never reach a state of equilibrium, but are instead in a continuous state of change. You could argue that the ultimate equilibrium state for a living system is death, but even in death biological systems are in a state of being degraded and eventually transformed into other types of organic matter or new forms of life.
I recently upgraded my PC from windoze ME to XP, and there does seem to be a dramatic improvement in the performance of the video cameras, to the point where the gains which I was using for motion tracking no longer work. With much faster video processing the robot appears to become hyperactive, with the servos perpetually overshooting and trying to compensate back. It's probably worth making the gains adjustable in the software so that it could potentially be run on different PCs.
- Bob
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