Toward cognitive robot companions

ABSTRACT

If robots have to be, one day, part of our environment and assist humans in their daily life, they will have to be endowed not only with the necessary functions for sensing, moving and acting, but also and inevitably, with more advanced cognitive capacities. Indeed a robot that will interact with people will need to be able to understand the spatial and dynamic structure of its environment, to exhibit a social behavior, to communicate with humans at the appropriate level of abstraction, to focus its attention and to take decisions for achieving tasks, to learn new knowledge and to evolve new capacities in an open-ended fashion.

The COGNIRON (The Cognitive Robot Companion) project studies the development of robots whose ultimate task would be serve and assist humans. The talk will overview the achievements of the project and its results that are demonstrated in three main experimental settings, enabling to exhibit cognitive capacities : the robot home tour, the curious and proactive robot and the robot learner.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.9 Robotics

General Terms:
Algorithms, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
cognitive robots, human robot interaction