Toward Virtuous Machines: When Ethics Meets Robotics

In very few years, the rapid evolution in Robotics research will lead to the designing and developing of intelligent autonomous robots behaving like humans. Robots will become pervasive and soon become part of humans’ lives. Beyond the technological aspects, to reach these objectives, the researchers and the roboticists must propose novel theories and find how to implement them to allow robots to align with social, moral, and legal cues. Roboethics aims to discuss ethical problems related to the design and use of autonomous robots. It aims at defining the conduct codes to instill virtuous AI in robots. This paper aims to overview the available issues and the proposed approaches to face the …

Human-Robot Teaming Interaction: a Cognitive Architecture Solution

Differences among young adults, adults and elderly chronic myeloid leukemia patients

Abstract BACKGROUND: The incidence of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) increases with age, but it is unclear how the characteristics of the disease vary with age. In children, where CML is very rare, it presents with more aggressive features, including huge splenomegaly, higher cell count and higher blast cell percentage. PATIENTS AND METHODS: To investigate if after childhood the disease maintains or loses these characteristics of aggressiveness, we analyzed 2784 adult patients, at least 18 years old, registered by GIMEMA CML WP over a 40-year period. RESULTS: Young adults (YAs: 18-29 years old) significantly differed from adults (30-59 years old) and elderly patients (at least 60 years old)…

The Inner Life of a Robot in Human-Robot Teaming

Giving the robot a 'human' inner life, such as the capability to think about itself and to understand what the other team members are doing, would increase the efficiency of trustworthy interactions with the other members of the team. Our long-Term research goal is to provide the robot with a computational model of inner life helping the robot to reason about itself, its capabilities, its environment and its teammates. Robot inner speech is a part of the research goal. In this paper, we summarize the results obtained in this direction.

Multiple Myeloma Treatment in Real-world Clinical Practice: Results of a Prospective, Multinational, Noninterventional Study.

© 2018 The Authors.

Agents and robots for collaborating and supporting physicians in healthcare scenarios

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Representing and developing knowledge using Jason, CArtAgO and OWL

Contexts where agents and humans are required to collaborate and cooperate in a human-like fashion are complex systems where a high degree of self-adaptability of every component is demanding. A fundamental ingredient when developing and implementing this kind of systems is the knowledge representation. Knowledge of the goals, the environment, other agents' capabilities and task and of itself, is crucial in deciding which action to perform to reach an objective and to behave in a self-adaptive way. The problem of knowledge modeling and representation becomes more and more urgent if the agents' operation domain changes at runtime. Knowledge has to be updated and handled while the system is i…

Robots as intelligent assistants to face COVID-19 pandemic

AbstractMotivationThe epidemic at the beginning of this year, due to a new virus in the coronavirus family, is causing many deaths and is bringing the world economy to its knees. Moreover, situations of this kind are historically cyclical. The symptoms and treatment of infected patients are, for better or worse even for new viruses, always the same: more or less severe flu symptoms, isolation and full hygiene. By now man has learned how to manage epidemic situations, but deaths and negative effects continue to occur. What about technology? What effect has the actual technological progress we have achieved? In this review, we wonder about the role of robotics in the fight against COVID. It p…

Agents in dynamic contexts, a system for learning plans

Reproducing the human ability to cooperate and collaborate in a dynamic environment is a significant challenge in the field of human-robot teaming interaction. Generally, in this context, a robot has to adapt itself to handle unforeseen situations. The problem is runtime planning when some factors are not known before the execution starts. This work aims to show and discuss a method to handle this kind of situation. Our idea is to use the Belief-Desire-Intention agent paradigm, its the Jason reasoning cycle and a Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System. The result is a novel method that gives the robot the ability to select the best plan.

Decision Process in Human-Agent Interaction: Extending Jason Reasoning Cycle

The main characteristic of an agent is acting on behalf of humans. Then, agents are employed as modeling paradigms for complex systems and their implementation. Today we are witnessing a growing increase in systems complexity, mainly when the presence of human beings and their interactions with the system introduces a dynamic variable not easily manageable during design phases. Design and implementation of this type of systems highlight the problem of making the system able to decide in autonomy. In this work we propose an implementation, based on Jason, of a cognitive architecture whose modules allow structuring the decision-making process by the internal states of the agents, thus combini…

At Your Service: Coffee Beans Recommendation From a Robot Assistant

With advances in the field of machine learning, precisely algorithms for recommendation systems, robot assistants are envisioned to become more present in the hospitality industry. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has also highlighted the need to have more service robots in our everyday lives, to minimise the risk of human to-human transmission. One such example would be coffee shops, which have become intrinsic to our everyday lives. However, serving an excellent cup of coffee is not a trivial feat as a coffee blend typically comprises rich aromas, indulgent and unique flavours and a lingering aftertaste. Our work addresses this by proposing a computational model which recommends optima…

Comparative Reasoning for Intelligent Agents

We demonstrate new comparative reasoning abilities of NARS, a formal model of intelligence, which enable the asymmetric comparison of perceivable quantifiable attributes of objects using rela- tions. These new abilities are implemented by extending NAL with addi- tional inference rules. We demonstrate the new capabilities in a bottle- picking experiment on a mobile robot running ONA, an implementation of NARS.

Knowledge acquisition through introspection in Human-Robot Cooperation

Abstract When cooperating with a team including humans, robots have to understand and update semantic information concerning the state of the environment. The run-time evaluation and acquisition of new concepts fall in the critical mass learning. It is a cognitive skill that enables the robot to show environmental awareness to complete its tasks successfully. A kind of self-consciousness emerges: the robot activates the introspective mental processes inferring if it owns a domain concept or not, and correctly blends the conceptual meaning of new entities. Many works attempt to simulate human brain functions leading to neural network implementation of consciousness; regrettably, some of thes…