  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 agent's actions and an agent's
sensors. It quantifies how much influence 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.
