Computational Modeling of Prefrontal Cortex for Meta-Cognition of a Humanoid Robot

Abstract

For robot intelligence and human-robot interaction (HRI), complex decision-making, interpretation, and adaptive planning processes are great challenges. These require recursive task processing and meta-cognitive reasoning mechanism. Naturally, the human brain realizes these cognitive skills by prefrontal cortex which is a part of the neocortex. Previous studies about neurocognitive robotics would not meet these requirements. Thus, it is aimed at developing a brain-inspired robot control architecture that performs spatial-temporal and emotional reasoning. In this study, we present a novel solution that covers a computational model of the prefrontal cortex for humanoid robots. Computational mechanisms are mainly placed on the bio-physical plausible neural structures embodied in different dynamics. The main components of the system are composed of several computational modules including dorsolateral, ventrolateral, anterior, and medial prefrontal regions. Also, it is responsible for organizing the working memory. A reinforcement meta-learning based explainable artificial intelligence (xAI) procedure is applied to the working memory regions of the computational prefrontal cortex model. Experimental evaluation and verification tests are processed by the developed software framework embodied in the humanoid robot platform. The humanoid robots’ perceptual states and cognitive processes including emotion, attention, and intention-based reasoning skills can be observed and controlled via the developed software. Several interaction scenarios are implemented to monitor and evaluate the model’s performance.