Conclusions

Abstract

The term morphological computation was first introduced about a decade ago to capture the observation that the exploitation of physical properties of the body and their interaction with the environment leads to a reduction of controller complexity. Two intuitive examples were given in the first chapter, grasping and running. In both cases, physical properties of the body, i.e., skin properties and elasticity of the muscle-tendon system, lead to a reduction of the amount of computation that the brain has to do. In case of grasping, the physical properties of the skin compensate less precise grasps, and in case of running, the elasticity of the muscle-tendon system compensates for the unevenness in the ground without the need for the brain to precisely monitor the ground’s roughness.