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Cognitive robotics

Overview

A robot

Robot

A robot is a virtual or mechanical artificial agent. In practice, it is usually an electro-mechanical machine which is guided by computer or electronic programming, and is thus able to do tasks on its own...

is an input-output device that is built from inanimate matter and its behavior in response to the environment is determined by how the robot was designed. By this definition, an elevator is a robot. Cognition

Cognition

Cognition is the scientific term for "the process of thought". Usage of the term varies in different disciplines; for example in psychology and cognitive science, it usually refers to an information processing view of an individual's psychological functions...

is the action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. Cognitive robotics is then the branch of robotics that is concerned with endowing the robot with intelligent behavior by providing the robot with a processing architecture that will allow it to learn and reason about how to behave in response to complex goals in complex environments.

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Encyclopedia

A robot

Robot

A robot is a virtual or mechanical artificial agent. In practice, it is usually an electro-mechanical machine which is guided by computer or electronic programming, and is thus able to do tasks on its own...

is an input-output device that is built from inanimate matter and its behavior in response to the environment is determined by how the robot was designed. By this definition, an elevator is a robot. Cognition

Cognition

Cognition is the scientific term for "the process of thought". Usage of the term varies in different disciplines; for example in psychology and cognitive science, it usually refers to an information processing view of an individual's psychological functions...

is the action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. Cognitive robotics is then the branch of robotics that is concerned with endowing the robot with intelligent behavior by providing the robot with a processing architecture that will allow it to learn and reason about how to behave in response to complex goals in complex environments. The robot's processing architecture in combination with the robot's goals and the robot's environment fully and mechanistically determines how the robot will move and behave. Goals may be specified by a user (either directly or indirectly) or may somehow come from the robot itself. If the goals of the robot come exclusively from within the robot, the robot is said to be fully autonomous.

Cognitive robotics views animal cognition as a starting point for the development of robotic computational algorithms, as opposed to more traditional Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science which aims to create it. Textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents,"...

techniques, which may or may not draw upon mammalian and human cognition as an inspiration for algorithm development. Robotic cognitive capabilities include perception processing, attention allocation, anticipation, planning, reasoning about other agents, and perhaps reasoning about their own mental states. Robotic cognition embodies the behavior of intelligent agent

Intelligent agent

In artificial intelligence, an intelligent agent is an autonomous entity which observes and acts upon an environment and directs its activity towards achieving goals . Intelligent agents may also learn or use knowledge to achieve their goals...

s in the physical world (or a virtual world, in the case of simulated cognitive robotics). In the most ambitious version, this implies that the robot must also be able to act in this real world.

Hence, a cognitive robot should exhibit:

knowledge
Knowledge
Knowledge is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information or awareness or familiarity gained...
beliefs
preferences
goals
informational attitudes
motivational attitudes (observing, communicating, revising beliefs, planning)
capabilities to move in the physical world, and to interact safely with objects in that world, including manipulation of these objects

Cognitive robotics involves the application and integration of various disciplines but is primarily inspired by psychology and brain science research. Core topics include knowledge representation, motivation, automated reasoning, planning and learning. A number of different methodologies can be adopted within cognitive robotics. These methodologies include not only the approach of classical symbolic AI —emphasizing symbolic reasoning and representation— but also more biologically-inspired approaches that use noisy and distributed representations of knowledge. One approach that attempts to merge a symbolic approach with a connectionist approach is SS-RICS. More purely connectionist and dynamic systems approaches for instance include Continuous Time Recurrent Neural Networks (CTRNNs) as studied by Randall Beer

Randall Beer

Randall D. Beer is a professor of cognitive science, computer science, and informatics at Indiana University. He was previously at Case Western Reserve University. His primary research interest is in understanding how coordinated behavior arises from the neurodynamics of an animal's nervous...

and colleagues and Adaptive Resonance Theory

Adaptive resonance theory

Adaptive Resonance Theory is a theory developed by Stephen Grossberg and Gail Carpenter on aspects of how the brain processes information. It describes a number of neural network models which use supervised and unsupervised learning methods, and address problems such as pattern recognition and...

(ART), developed by Stephen Grossberg

Stephen Grossberg

Stephen Grossberg is a cognitive scientist, neuroscientist, biomedical engineer, mathematician, and neuromorphic technologist. He is the Wang Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and a Professor of Mathematics, Psychology, and Biomedical Engineering at Boston University.Because of his...

and colleagues.

One of the learning techniques that are used for robots is learning by imitation: the robot, provided with all the sensors and physical hardware needed to perform a human task, is monitoring the human performing a task, and then the robot tries to imitate the same movements that the human performed in order to achieve the task. Using its sensors, the robot should be able to create a three-dimensional image of the environment, and to recognize the objects in that image. A major challenge is hence to interpret the scene, and to understand what objects are needed in the task and which are not.

A more complex learning approach is autonomous knowledge acquisition: the robot now uses its sensors and its knowledge about the physical properties of the world, and is then left to explore the environment on its own. One of the terminologies of this behaviour is called motor babbling. Basically the whole idea of this approach is to let the robot discover its capabilities on its own.

Some researchers in cognitive robotics have begun using architectures such as (ACT-R

ACT-R

ACT-R is a cognitive architecture mainly developed by John Robert Anderson at Carnegie Mellon University...

and Soar (cognitive architecture)

Soar (cognitive architecture)

Soar is a symbolic cognitive architecture, created by John Laird, Allen Newell, and Paul Rosenbloom at Carnegie Mellon University. It is both a view of what cognition is and an implementation of that view through a computer programming architecture for Artificial Intelligence...

) as a basis of their cognitive robotics programs. These architectures have been successfully used to simulate operator performance and human performance when modelling laboratory data. The idea is to extend these architectures to handle real-world sensory input as that input continuously unfolds through time.

Some of the fundamental questions to still be answered in cognitive robotics are:

How much human programming should or can be involved to support the learning processes?
How can one quantify progress? Some of the adopted ways is the reward and punishment. But what kind of reward and what kind of punishment? In humans, when teaching a little infant for example, the reward would be a chocolate or some encouragement, and the punishment will have many ways. But what is the effective way with robots?

Cognitive robotics

See also

External links