Abstract
The next generation of robot companions or robot working partners will need to satisfy social requirements somehow similar to the famous laws of robotics envisaged by Isaac Asimov time ago (Asimov, 1942). The necessary technology has almost reached the required level, including sensors and actuators, but the cognitive organization is still in its infancy and is only partially supported by the current understanding of brain cognitive processes. The brain of symbiotic robots will certainly not be a “positronic” replica of the human brain: probably, the greatest part of it will be a set of interacting computational processes running in the cloud. In this article, we review the challenges that must be met in the design of a set of interacting computational processes as building blocks of a cognitive architecture that may give symbiotic capabilities to collaborative robots of the next decades: (1) an animated body-schema; (2) an imitation machinery; (3) a motor intentions machinery; (4) a set of physical interaction mechanisms; and (5) a shared memory system for incremental symbiotic development. We would like to stress that our approach is totally un-hierarchical: the five building blocks of the shared cognitive architecture are fully bi-directionally connected. For example, imitation and intentional processes require the “services” of the animated body schema which, on the other hand, can run its simulations if appropriately prompted by imitation and/or intention, with or without physical interaction. Successful experiences can leave a trace in the shared memory system and chunks of memory fragment may compete to participate to novel cooperative actions. And so on and so forth. At the heart of the system is lifelong training and learning but, different from the conventional learning paradigms in neural networks, where learning is somehow passively imposed by an external agent, in symbiotic robots there is an element of free choice of what is worth learning, driven by the interaction between the robot and the human partner. The proposed set of building blocks is certainly a rough approximation of what is needed by symbiotic robots but we believe it is a useful starting point for building a computational framework.
Highlights
Symbiosis: what does it mean, exactly? this question has been the topic of debate for over a century, current biology and ecology textbooks generally agree to use an early and rather broad definition proposed by the German biologist Heinrich Anton de Bary at the end of the 19th century: ‘‘Symbiosis is the living together of unlike organisms.’’ Usually, this definition takes for granted that both organisms are biological. Licklider (1960) was probably the first one to extend the paradigm, assuming that one element of the pair could be cybernetic instead of biological
The brain of symbiotic robots will certainly not be a ‘‘positronic’’ replica of the human brain: probably, the greatest part of it will be a set of interacting computational processes running in the cloud
In this article we review a small set of such computational processes or building blocks of a cognitive architecture shared by human and robot partner, that may constitute a preliminary attempt to give symbiotic capabilities to cobots of the decades: (1) an animated bodyschema; (2) an imitation machinery; (3) a motor intentions machinery; (4) a set of physical interaction mechanisms; and (5) a shared memory system for incremental symbiotic development
Summary
Symbiosis: what does it mean, exactly? this question has been the topic of debate for over a century, current biology and ecology textbooks generally agree to use an early and rather broad definition proposed by the German biologist Heinrich Anton de Bary at the end of the 19th century: ‘‘Symbiosis is the living together of unlike organisms.’’ Usually, this definition takes for granted that both organisms are biological. Licklider (1960) was probably the first one to extend the paradigm, assuming that one element of the pair could be cybernetic instead of biological. The body schema animation framework offers: (a) Computational simplicity—circumventing the need for explicit kinematic inversions while shaping motor output for action generation; (b) Goal specific configurability to coordinate diverse body and body+tool networks at runtime; and (c) Ecological efficiency, in the sense of recycling the same computational machinery for covert simulation of the consequences/goals of potential actions of one self and the other We believe this is an essential building block for human robot symbiosis, well grounded on emerging trends from motor neurosciences and embodied cognition. Such preliminary experiments point out at the circularity of the interacting process that may facilitate the development of growing levels of human-robot symbiosis
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
