This book chapter is an introduction to and an overview of the information-theoretic, task independent utility function Empowerment, which is defined as the channel capacity between an agents actions and an agents sensors. It quantifies how much infl
uence and control an agent has over the world it can perceive. This book chapter discusses the general idea behind empowerment as an intrinsic motivation and showcases several previous applications of empowerment to demonstrate how empowerment can be applied to different sensor-motor configuration, and how the same formalism can lead to different observed behaviors. Furthermore, we also present a fast approximation for empowerment in the continuous domain.
