ROBOT TOOL BEHAVIOR: A DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACH TO AUTONOMOUS TOOL USE Approved by:

To my late grandfather, who was a carpenter and taught me how to use the tools in his workshop when I was a child. He wanted me to become an architect. I hope that being a roboticist would have been a distant second on his list. iii PREFACE I was fortunate to stumble upon the topic of autonomous tool use in robots for my disserta-tion. When I joined the robotics lab at Georgia Tech I began to look for a good dissertation topic. For almost two years I was reading the robotics literature with that goal in mind. I enjoyed reading but the more I read the more I felt that all the good dissertation topics have already been taken. So I started reading books from other fields of science in hope of finding an inspiration. Finally, the years of reading paid off when I stumbled across Thomas Power’s book entitled “Play and Exploration in Children and Animals.” At first I was angry at myself for even borrowing a book from the library about childre