Neuro Inspired Robotics: What Robot Learning Can Borrow from the Sensorimotor Brain

Abstract

Robot policies still fail at everyday manipulation: an unfamiliar task, an object never held before, a scene that changes mid-motion, a skill that should improve with use. They fail despite pretraining on over a million trajectories, pooled from dozens of robots at great expense, while a child acquires all of these abilities within a few years of learning from a single body. This survey argues that the gap is one of design, and proposes designs for the next generation of robot models, drawn from how the nervous system solves the same problems. From the body we take compliance: the policy commands stiffness alongside position, so the controller yields where the task allows and presses where it must, which greatly lowers the demand for precise position output. From the visual system, where a fast pathway for action runs in parallel with the slow pathway for recognition, we take a dedicated fast vision system for motor behavior: it precomputes the quantities the policy needs and drives a reactive policy at camera rate. From the cerebellum we take a predictor beside the policy that forecasts the consequence of each command and recalibrates from its own error. From motor cortex we take a single model that composes action units from primitives, verifies each at a sensory boundary, practices the weakest unit with a hypothesis in mind, and reasons each attempt closer to the goal. Proven primitives are then consolidated from code into weights, so they run fluently and respond quickly the next time. Together these describe a robot that acts on its own initiative, the basis of deployment and recursive self-improvement, and we offer each proposal as a hypothesis to be tested.