Mobiligence: Emergence of Adaptive Motor Function through Interaction among the Body, Brain and Environment

The Mobiligence project is a five-year project started from 2005[1], which was accepted as a program of Scientific Research on Priority Areas of Grant-in-Aid Scientific Research from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). In addition to the planned research groups which started in 2005, new two-years-research groups (applied research groups) will be selected and start from 2006. Human can behave adaptively even in diverse and complex environment. All the animals or even insects can perform various types of adaptive behaviors, such as a locomotive behavior in the form of swimming, flying walking, a manipulation behaviors such as reaching, capturing, grasping by using hands and arms, a social behavior to the other subjects, etc. Such adaptive behaviors are the intelligent sensory-motor functions, and most essential and indispensable ones for life forms to survive. However, the mechanisms for the generation of intelligent adaptive behaviors are not thoroughly understood. Such an adaptive function is considered to emerge from the interaction of the body, brain, and environment, which requires that a subject acts or moves. Base on the consideration, we call the intelligence for generating adaptive motor function mobiligence. The final goal of this project is to establish the common principle underlying the emergence of mobiligence. In this project, the mobiligence mechanism is to be understood by the constructive and systematic approaches, through the collaboration of biologists and engineering scientists who developed biological models by integrating physiological data and kinetic modeling technologies.