Tamburrini and Datteri attempt to connect the cybernetics community with the computer science/robotics community. Cybernetics has traditionally focused on investigating machine models of adaptive sensorimotor behaviors observed in nature. The main question addressed in the paper is the role of machine experiments in testing behavioral models. The authors suggest that cybernetics, with its multiple ways of realizing mechanisms, is the right tool for comparing biological systems and machines.

The paper focuses on analyzing how a sensorimotor task, that of moving a handheld object along a trajectory, can be instantiated in machines, and on how a comparison of biological systems with artificial ones can be done. The paper includes a discussion of what makes a real robotic system different from a simulated one, from the point of view of using it to test models, and describes the advantage of using real machines in real environments.

The paper is dense, and sometimes hard to follow because it builds on a large set of cybernetics literature, but intriguing. It sheds new light on issues related to modeling and testing models that are familiar to roboticists as well as cognitive neuroscientists.