Your comment regarding the training of the NN to perceive and action the joint actuators reminded me of an old software project that's remotely related: http:/

Your comment regarding the training of the NN to perceive and action the joint actuators reminded me of an old software project that's remotely related: http://www.framsticks.com/ http://www.framsticks.com/ It's an ambitious project that wanted to "Evolve" agents made of sticks + joints that ran in a 3d world with physics. The joints had signal inputs + activation functions that are similar to AN activation functions.