Adaptive Motion of Animals and Machines

* Motivation It is our dream to understand the principles of animals' remarkable ability for adaptive motion and to transfer such abilities to a robot. Up to now, mechanisms for generation and control of stereotyped motions and adaptive motions in well-known simple environments have been formulated to some extentandsuccessfullyappliedtorobots.However,principlesofadaptationto variousenvironmentshavenotyetbeenclari?ed,andautonomousadaptation remains unsolved as a seriously di?cult problem in robotics. Apparently, the ability of animals and robots to adapt in a real world cannot be explained or realized by one single function in a control system and mechanism. That is, adaptation in motion is induced at every level from thecentralnervoussystemtothemusculoskeletalsystem.Thus,weorganized the International Symposium on Adaptive Motion in Animals and Machines(AMAM) forscientistsandengineersconcernedwithadaptation onvariouslevelstobebroughttogethertodiscussprinciplesateachleveland to investigate principles governing total systems. * History AMAM started in Montreal (Canada) in August 2000. It was organized by H. Kimura (Japan) , H. Witte (Germany) , G. Taga (Japan) , and K. Osuka (Japan) , who had agreed that having a small symposium on motion control, with people from several ?elds coming together to discuss speci?c issues, was worthwhile. Those four organizing committee members determined the scope of AMAM as follows.