Title: Deep Self-Modeling for Robotic Systems
Description: As self-awareness is important to human higher level cognition so too is the ability to self-model important to performing complex behaviors. The power of these self-models is one that I demonstrate grows with the complexity of problems being solved, and thus provides the framework for higher level cognition. I demonstrate that self-models can be used to effectively control and improve on existing control algorithms to allow agents to perform complex tasks. I further investigate new ways in which these self-models can be learned and applied to increase their efficacy and improve the ability of these models to generalize across tasks and bodies. Finally, I demonstrate the overall power of these self-models to allow for complex tasks to be completed with little data across a variety of bodies and using a number of algorithms.