A basis for Cognitive machines

SPIE Proceedings, 2009

Our long-term goal is to develop autonomous robotic systems that have the cognitive abilities of humans, including communication, coordination, adapting to novel situations, and learning through experience. Our approach rests on the recent integration of the Soar cognitive architecture with both virtual and physical robotic systems. Soar has been used to develop a wide variety of knowledge-rich agents for complex virtual environments, including distributed training environments and interactive computer games. For development and testing in robotic virtual environments, Soar interfaces to a variety of robotic simulators and a simple mobile robot. We have recently made significant extensions to Soar that add new memories and new non-symbolic reasoning to Soar's original symbolic processing, which should significantly improve Soar abilities for control of robots. These extensions include episodic memory, semantic memory, reinforcement learning, and mental imagery. Episodic memory and semantic memory support the learning and recalling of prior events and situations as well as facts about the world. Reinforcement learning provides the ability of the system to tune its procedural knowledgeknowledge about how to do things. Mental imagery supports the use of diagrammatic and visual representations that are critical to support spatial reasoning. We speculate on the future of unmanned systems and the need for cognitive robotics to support dynamic instruction and taskability.

IEEE Systems Journal, 2017

Understanding consciousness is one of the most fascinating challenges of our time. From ancient civilizations to modern philosophers, questions have been asked on how one is conscious of his/her own existence and about the world that surrounds him/her. Although there is no precise definition for consciousness, there is an agreement that it is strongly related to human cognitive processes such as attention, a process capable of promoting a selection of a few stimuli from a huge amount of information that reaches us constantly. In order to bring the consciousness discussion to a computational scenario, this paper presents conscious attention-based integrated model (CONAIM), a formal model for machine consciousness based on an attentional schema for human-like agent cognition that integrates: short-and long-term memories, reasoning, planning, emotion, decision-making, learning, motivation, and volition. Experimental results in a mobile robotics domain show that the agent can attentively use motivation, volition, and memories to set its goals and learn new concepts and procedures based on exogenous and endogenous stimuli. By performing computation over an attentional space, the model also allowed the agent to learn over a much reduced state space. Further implementation under this model could potentially allow the agent to express sentience, self-awareness, self-consciousness, autonoetic consciousness, mineness, and perspectivalness.

Advanced Engineering Informatics, 2010

The Ikaros project started in 2001 with the aim of developing an open infrastructure for system-level brain modeling. The system has developed into a general tool for cognitive modeling as well as robot control. Here we describe the main parts of the Ikaros system and how it has been used to implement various cognitive systems and to control a number of different robots ranging from robot arms and hands to active vision systems and mobile robots.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006

Before making a movement aimed at achieving a task, human beings either run a mental process that attempts to find a feasible course of action (at the same time, it must be compatible with a number of internal and external constraints and near-optimal according to some criterion) or select it from a repertoire of previously learned actions, according to the parameters of the task. If neither reasoning process succeeds, a typical backup strategy is to look for a tool that might allow the operator to match all the task constraints. A cognitive robot should support a similar reasoning system. A central element of this architecture is a coupled pair of controllers: FMC (forward motor controller: it maps tentative trajectories in the joint space into the corresponding trajectories of the end-effector variables in the workspace) and IMC (inverse motor controller: it maps desired trajectories of the end-effector into feasible trajectories in the joint space). The proposed FMC/IMC architecture operates with any degree of redundancy and can deal with geometric constraints (range of motion in the joint space, internal and external constraints in the workspace) and effort-related constraints (range of torque of the actuators, etc.). It operates by alternating two basic operations: 1) relaxation in the configuration space (for reaching a target pose); 2) relaxation in the null space of the kinematic transformation (for producing the required interaction force). The failure of either relaxation can trigger a higher level of reasoning. For both elements of the architecture we propose a closed-form solution and a solution based on ANNs.

Studies in Computational Intelligence, 2010

Using multimodal sensors to perceive the environment and subsequently performing intelligent sensor/motor allocation is of crucial interest for building autonomous systems. Such a capability should allow autonomous entities to (re)allocate their resources for solving their most critical tasks depending on their current state, sensory input and knowledge about the world. Architectures of artificial real-world systems with internal representation of the world and such dynamic motor allocation capabilities are invaluable for systems with limited resources. Based upon recent advances in attention research and psychophysiology we propose a general purpose selective attention mechanism that supports the construction of a world model and subsequent intelligent motor control. We implement and test this architecture including its selective attention mechanism, to build a probabilistic world model. The constructed world-model is used to select actions by means of a Bayesian inference method. Our method is tested in a multi-robot task, both in simulation and in the real world, including a coordination mission involving aerial and ground vehicles.

Electronics

Robotics and control are both research and application domains that have been frequently engineered with the use of interdisciplinary approaches like cybernetics [...]

cosy.informatik.uni-bremen.de

Cognitive Systems Research

CORTEX is a cognitive robotics architecture inspired by three key ideas: modularity, internal modelling and graph representations. CORTEX is also a computational framework designed to support early forms of intelligence in real world, human interacting robots, by selecting an a priori functional decomposition of the capabilities of the robot. This set of abilities was then translated to computational modules or agents, each one built as a network of software interconnected components. The nature of these agents can range from pure reactive modules connected to sensors and/or actuators, to pure deliberative ones, but they can only communicate with each other through a graph structure called Deep State Representation (DSR). DSR is a shortterm dynamic representation of the space surrounding the robot, the objects and the humans in it, and the robot itself. All these entities are perceived and transformed into different levels of abstraction, ranging from geometric data to high-level symbolic relations such as "the person is talking and gazing at me". The combination of symbolic and geometric information endows the architecture with the potential to simulate and anticipate the outcome of the actions executed by the robot. In this paper we present recent advances in the CORTEX architecture and several real-world human-robot interaction scenarios in which they have been tested. We describe our interpretation of the ideas inspiring the architecture and the reasons why this specific computational framework is a promising architecture for the social robots of tomorrow.

2014

We are now on the verge of the next technical revolutionrobots are going to invade our lives. However, to interact with humans or to be incorporated into a human "collective" robots have to be provided with some human-like cognitive abilities. What does it mean?-Nobody knows. But, robotics research communities are trying hard to find out a way to cope with this problem. Meanwhile, despite abundant funding these efforts did not lead to any meaningful result (only in Europe, only in the past ten years, Cognitive Robotics research funding has reached a ceiling of 1.39 billion euros). In the next ten years, a similar budget is going to be spent to tackle the Cognitive Robotics problems in the frame of the Human Brain Project. There is no reason to expect that this time the result will be different. We would like to try to explain why we are so unhappy about this.

2000

Although overlooked in recent years as tools for research, cognitive software architectures are designed to bring computational models of reasoning to bear on real-world physical systems. This paper makes a case for using the executives in these architectures as research tools to explore the connection between cognitive science and intelligent robotics.