17 May 2008

Next Generation Cognitive Robots

Building robots with anything akin to human intelligence remains a far off vision, but European researchers are making progress on piecing together a new generation of machines that are more aware of their environment and better able to interact with humans. As research into artificial cognitive systems (ACS) has progressed in recent years it has grown into a highly fragmented field. Some researchers and teams have concentrated on machine vision, others on spatial cognition, and on human-robot interaction, among many other disciplines. All have made progress, but, as the EU-funded project CoSy (Cognitive Systems for Cognitive Assistants) has shown, by working together the researchers can make even more advances in the field.

The researchers have made the ACS architecture toolkit they developed available under an open source license. They want to encourage further research. The toolkit has already sparked several spin-off initiatives. Because of the complexity most robots developed to date have tended to be reactive. They simply react to their environment rather than act in it autonomously. Similar to a beetle that scuttles away when prodded, many mobile robots back off when they collide with an object, but have little self-awareness or understanding of the space around them and what they can do there. In comparison, a demonstrator called the Explorer developed by the CoSy team has a more human-like understanding of its environment. Explorer can even talk about its surroundings with a human.