6 CONCLUSIONS
We presented the distributed control architecture DIS-
TAL along with the modular humanoid robot MYON,
which seamlessly supports DISTAL. Having ad-
dressed important use cases of different experimen-
tal settings, we detailed the mechanisms of DISTAL
which allow for the specific characteristics of those
settings. Most important, and at the same time unique
amongst humanoid robot platforms, are the ability of
stand-alone operation of single limbs and the enabling
of runtime-metamorphosis.
Using the appealing computational simplicity of
time-discrete neural networks (the complexity of
which being only bound by the number of processor
nodes), we could illustrate that the proposed neural
byte-code (NBC) is suitable for graphical editing of
neural networks, and at the same time also almost di-
rectly translates into compact machine code for the
32-bit ARM RISC processors.
Not only did we present a theoretical framework
and a corresponding computational infrastructure,
but also the fully functional robot platform MYON,
the accompanying application software BRAINDE-
SIGNER, and a whole-systems example of the robot
which is able to autonomously locate, grip and relo-
cate objects by purely neural control paradigms which
have been realized with DISTAL. Further research
will focus on adaptive neurons and synapses, learn-
ing rules, and networks for self-explorative behavior.
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