Search results for "Robotics and AI"
showing 10 items of 18 documents
The Active Inference Approach to Ecological Perception: General Information Dynamics for Natural and Artificial Embodied Cognition
2018
The emerging neurocomputational vision of humans as embodied, ecologically embedded, social agents – who shape and are shaped by their environment – offers a golden opportunity to revisit and revise ideas about the physical and information-theoretic underpinnings of life, mind, and consciousness itself. In particular, the active inference framework (AIF) makes it possible to bridge connections from computational neuroscience and robotics/AI to ecological psychology and phenomenology, revealing common underpinnings and overcoming key limitations. AIF opposes the mechanistic to the reductive, while staying fully grounded in a naturalistic and information theoretic foundation, using the princi…
In Situ Representations and Access Consciousness in Neural Blackboard or Workspace Architectures
2018
Phenomenal theories of consciousness assert that consciousness is based on specific neural correlates in the brain, which can be separated from all cognitive functions we can perform. If so, the search for robot consciousness seems to be doomed. By contrast, theories of functional or access consciousness assert that consciousness can be studied only with forms of cognitive access, given by cognitive processes. Consequently, consciousness and cognitive access cannot be fully dissociated. Here, the global features of cognitive access of consciousness are discussed based on neural blackboard or (global) workspace architectures, combined with content addressable or "in situ" representations as …
A Basic Architecture of an Autonomous Adaptive System With Conscious-Like Function for a Humanoid Robot.
2018
In developing a humanoid robot, there are two major objectives. One is developing a physical robot having body, hands, and feet resembling those of human beings and being able to similarly control them. The other is to develop a control system that works similarly to our brain, to feel, think, act, and learn like ours. In this article, an architecture of a control system with a brain-oriented logical structure for the second objective is proposed. The proposed system autonomously adapts to the environment and implements a clearly defined “consciousness” function, through which both habitual behavior and goal-directed behavior are realized. Consciousness is regarded as a function for effecti…
Acceptability Study of A3-K3 Robotic Architecture for a Neurorobotics Painting
2019
In this paper, authors present a novel architecture for controlling an industrial robot via Brain Computer Interface. The robot used is a Series 2000 KR 210-2. The robotic arm was fitted with DI drawing devices that clamp, hold and manipulate various artistic media like brushes, pencils, pens. User selected a high-level task, for instance a shape or movement, using a human machine interface and the translation in robot movement was entirely demanded to the Robot Control Architecture defining a plan to accomplish user's task. The architecture was composed by a Human Machine Interface based on P300 Brain Computer Interface and a robotic architecture composed by a deliberative layer and a reac…
Modelling and Control of a 2-DOF Robot Arm with Elastic Joints for Safe Human-Robot Interaction
2021
Collaborative robots (or cobots) are robots that can safely work together or interact with humans in a common space. They gradually become noticeable nowadays. Compliant actuators are very relevant for the design of cobots. This type of actuation scheme mitigates the damage caused by unexpected collision. Therefore, elastic joints are considered to outperform rigid joints when operating in a dynamic environment. However, most of the available elastic robots are relatively costly or difficult to construct. To give researchers a solution that is inexpensive, easily customisable, and fast to fabricate, a newly-designed low-cost, and open-source design of an elastic joint is presented in this w…
Optical See-Through Head-Mounted Displays With Short Focal Distance: Conditions for Mitigating Parallax-Related Registration Error
2020
Optical see-through (OST) augmented reality head-mounted displays are quickly emerging as a key asset in several application fields but their ability to profitably assist high precision activities in the peripersonal space is still sub-optimal due to the calibration procedure required to properly model the user's viewpoint through the see-through display. In this work, we demonstrate the beneficial impact, on the parallax-related AR misregistration, of the use of optical see-through displays whose optical engines collimate the computer-generated image at a depth close to the fixation point of the user in the peripersonal space. To estimate the projection parameters of the OST display for a …
Automation Inner Speech as an Anthropomorphic Feature Affecting Human Trust: Current Issues and Future Directions
2021
This paper aims to discuss the possible role of inner speech in influencing trust in human–automation interaction. Inner speech is an everyday covert inner monolog or dialog with oneself, which is essential for human psychological life and functioning as it is linked to self-regulation and self-awareness. Recently, in the field of machine consciousness, computational models using different forms of robot speech have been developed that make it possible to implement inner speech in robots. As is discussed, robot inner speech could be a new feature affecting human trust by increasing robot transparency and anthropomorphism.
A Playful Experiential Learning System With Educational Robotics
2020
This article reports on two studies that aimed to evaluate the effective impact of educational robotics in learning concepts related to Physics and Geography. The reported studies involved two courses from an upper secondary school and two courses from a lower secondary school. Upper secondary school classes studied topics of motion physics, and lower secondary school classes explored issues related to geography. In each grade, there was an “experimental group” that carried out their study using robotics and cooperative learning and a “control group” that studied the same concepts without robots. Students in both classes were subjected to tests before and after the robotics laboratory, to c…
SEAI: Social Emotional Artificial Intelligence Based on Damasio’s Theory of Mind
2018
A socially intelligent robot must be capable to extract meaningful information in real-time from the social environment and react accordingly with coherent human-like behaviour. Moreover, it should be able to internalise this information, to reason on it at a higher abstract level, build its own opinions independently and then automatically bias the decision-making according to its unique experience. In the last decades, neuroscience research highlighted the link between the evolution of such complex behaviour and the evolution of a certain level of consciousness, which cannot leave out of a body that feels emotions as discriminants and prompters. In order to develop cognitive systems for s…
Expanding the Active Inference Landscape: More Intrinsic Motivations in the Perception-Action Loop
2018
Active inference is an ambitious theory that treats perception, inference and action selection of autonomous agents under the heading of a single principle. It suggests biologically plausible explanations for many cognitive phenomena, including consciousness. In active inference, action selection is driven by an objective function that evaluates possible future actions with respect to current, inferred beliefs about the world. Active inference at its core is independent from extrinsic rewards, resulting in a high level of robustness across e.g.\ different environments or agent morphologies. In the literature, paradigms that share this independence have been summarised under the notion of in…