A proposal for a tool that helps handling variability and remains compliant with falsifiability

Frédéric Davesne (1)

1 LSC - Laboratoire Systèmes Complexes

On one hand, control theory is based on proofs before the experiment in order to validate an a priori (partially) known deterministic interaction between the robot and its environment; the gain of this methodology is the expected reliability of the real system based on his model. On another hand, statistical methods are used when the envi- ronment is supposed unknown; in return, the ro- bot may own adaptation capabilities but its be- havior is not predictable before the experiment and is not necessary reliable. We believe that the core issue for the first ap- proach (that we call deterministic approach) relies on the fact it cannot handle the variety of all the possible situations in an unconstrain environment (we call this the variability issue). Oppositely, we think that the statistical approach is essentially missing a validating stage before the experiment in order to possibly falsify a given model. The aim of this article is to suggest a method- ology that combines both a validating stage be- fore the experiment and the settlement of models that handle unknown environments. To do this, we build models that own a validation statement and internal parameters that fix a compromise between falsifiability and robustness. For simple cases, we show that it is possible to fix internal parameters in order to meet the two antagonist constraints. As a consequence, we stress that the precision of the model has a lower bound and we determine a Heisenberg-like uncertainty principle.

Domains: Signal and Image Processing; Image Processing [eess.IV]; Medical Imaging; Signal and Image processing

Frédéric Davesne. A proposal for a tool that helps handling variability and remains compliant with falsifiability. Towards Autonomous RObotic Systems (TAROS 2005), Sep 2005, London, United Kingdom. pp.43--50. ⟨hal-00342196⟩