Behavioral And Cognitive Robotics An Adaptive Perspective

This book describes how to create robots capable to develop the behavioral and cognitive skills required to perform a task through machine learning methods. It focuses on model-free approaches with minimal human intervention in which the behavior used by the robots to solve their task and the way in which such behavior is produced is discovered by the adaptive process automatically, i.e. it is not specified by the experimenter. The book, which is targeted toward researchers, PhD and Master students with an interest in machine learning and robotics: (i) introduces autonomous robots, evolutionary algorithms, reinforcement learning algorithms, and learning by demonstration methods, (ii) uses concrete experiments to illustrate the fundamental aspects of embodied intelligence, (iii) provides theoretical and practical knowledge, including tutorials and exercises, and (iv) provides an integrated review of recent research in this area carried within partially separated research communities.

The development and use of robotics is affecting all aspects of modern life. There is a demand not only for robots that can move, interact, learn, and act in real-time dynamic and unconstrained environments but also for those that can interact smoothly and safely with the actions and movements of people within the same environments. In addition to managing complex motor coordination, these robots also require the ability to acquire and represent knowledge, deal with uncertainty at different operational levels, learn, reason, adapt, and have the autonomy to make intelligent decisions and act upon them. They should be able to learn from interaction, anticipate the outcomes of actions, acquire experiences and use them as required for future activities. Cognitive robotics is the interdisciplinary term used to describe robots that merge all these features and capabilities in their hardware and software architectures.

The current state of the art in cognitive robotics, covering the challenges of building AI-powered intelligent robots inspired by natural cognitive systems. A novel approach to building AI-powered intelligent robots takes inspiration from the way natural cognitive systems—in humans, animals, and biological systems—develop intelligence by exploiting the full power of interactions between body and brain, the physical and social environment in which they live, and phylogenetic, developmental, and learning dynamics. This volume reports on the current state of the art in cognitive robotics, offering the first comprehensive coverage of building robots inspired by natural cognitive systems. Contributors first provide a systematic definition of cognitive robotics and a history of developments in the field. They describe in detail five main approaches: developmental, neuro, evolutionary, swarm, and soft robotics. They go on to consider methodologies and concepts, treating topics that include commonly used cognitive robotics platforms and robot simulators, biomimetic skin as an example of a hardware-based approach, machine-learning methods, and cognitive architecture. Finally, they cover the behavioral and cognitive capabilities of a variety of models, experiments, and applications, looking at issues that range from intrinsic motivation and perception to robot consciousness. Cognitive Robotics is aimed at an interdisciplinary audience, balancing technical details and examples for the computational reader with theoretical and experimental findings for the empirical scientist.

This book provides state-of-the-art scientific and engineering research findings and developments in the area of mobile robotics and associated support technologies. The book contains peer reviewed articles presented at the CLAWAR 2012 conference. Robots are no longer confined to industrial and manufacturing environments. A great deal of interest is invested in the use of robots outside the factory environment. The CLAWAR conference series, established as a high profile international event, acts as a platform for dissemination of research and development findings and supports such a trend to address the current interest in mobile robotics to meet the needs of mankind in various sectors of the society. These include personal care, public health, services in the domestic, public and industrial environments. The editors of the book have extensive research experience and publications in the area of robotics in general and in mobile robotics specifically, and their experience is reflected in editing the contents of the book.

The kimono-clad android robot that recently made its debut as the new greeter at the entrance of Tokyo's Mitsukoshi department store is just one example of the rapid advancements being made in the field of robotics.Cognitive robotics is an approach to creating artificial intelligence in robots by enabling them to learn from and respond to real-worl

An overview of the basic concepts and methodologies of evolutionary robotics, which views robots as autonomous artificial organisms that develop their own skills in close interaction with the environment and without human intervention.

The first comprehensive treatment of active inference, an integrative perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior used across multiple disciplines. Active inference is a way of understanding sentient behavior—a theory that characterizes perception, planning, and action in terms of probabilistic inference. Developed by theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston over years of groundbreaking research, active inference provides an integrated perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior that is increasingly used across multiple disciplines including neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. Active inference puts the action into perception. This book offers the first comprehensive treatment of active inference, covering theory, applications, and cognitive domains. Active inference is a “first principles” approach to understanding behavior and the brain, framed in terms of a single imperative to minimize free energy. The book emphasizes the implications of the free energy principle for understanding how the brain works. It first introduces active inference both conceptually and formally, contextualizing it within current theories of cognition. It then provides specific examples of computational models that use active inference to explain such cognitive phenomena as perception, attention, memory, and planning.

The development of cognitive science is one of the most remarkable and fascinating intellectual achievements of the modern era. The quest to understand the mind is as old as recorded human thought; but the progress of modern science has offered new methods and techniques which have revolutionized this enquiry. Oxford University Press now presents a masterful history of cognitive science, told by one of its most eminent practitioners. Cognitive science is the project of understanding the mind by modeling its workings. Psychology is its heart, but it draws together various adjoining fields of research, including artificial intelligence; neuroscientific study of the brain; philosophical investigation of mind, language, logic, and understanding; computational work on logic and reasoning; linguistic research on grammar, semantics, and communication; and anthropological explorations of human similarities and differences. Each discipline, in its own way, asks what the mind is, what it does, how it works, how it developed - how it is even possible. The key distinguishing characteristic of cognitive science, Boden suggests, compared with older ways of thinking about the mind, is the notion of understanding the mind as a kind of machine. She traces the origins of cognitive science back to Descartes's revolutionary ideas, and follows the story through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the pioneers of psychology and computing appear. Then she guides the reader through the complex interlinked paths along which the study of the mind developed in the twentieth century. Cognitive science, in Boden's broad conception, covers a wide range of aspects of mind: not just 'cognition' in the sense of knowledge or reasoning, but emotion, personality, social communication, and even action. In each area of investigation, Boden introduces the key ideas and the people who developed them. No one else could tell this story as Boden can: she has been an active participant in cognitive science since the 1960s, and has known many of the key figures personally. Her narrative is written in a lively, swift-moving style, enriched by the personal touch of someone who knows the story at first hand. Her history looks forward as well as back: it is her conviction that cognitive science today--and tomorrow--cannot be properly understood without a historical perspective. Mind as Machine will be a rich resource for anyone working on the mind, in any academic discipline, who wants to know how our understanding of our mental activities and capacities has developed.

Anticipatory behavior in adaptive learning systems continues attracting attention of researchers in many areas, including cognitive systems, neuroscience, psychology, and machine learning. This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Anticipatory Behavior in Adaptive Learning Systems, ABiALS 2008, held in Munich, Germany, in June 2008, in collaboration with the six-monthly Meeting of euCognition 'The Role of Anticipation in Cognition'. The 18 revised full papers presented were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement for inclusion in the book. The introductory chapter of this state-of-the-art survey not only provides an overview of the contributions included in this volume but also revisits the current available terminology on anticipatory behavior and relates it to the available system approaches. The papers are organized in topical sections on anticipation in psychology with focus on the ideomotor view, conceptualizations, anticipation and dynamical systems, computational modeling of psychological processes in the individual and social domains, behavioral and cognitive capabilities based on anticipation, and computational frameworks and algorithms for anticipation, and their evaluation.

Robotics and control are both research and application domains that have been frequently engineered through the use of interdisciplinary approaches like cybernetics. Cognition is a particular concept of this approach, abstracted from the context of living organisms to that of artificial devices, and is concerned with knowledge acquisition and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. Cognitive robotics and control refer to knowledge processing as much as knowledge generation from problem understanding, leading to special forms of architectures that enable systems to behave in an autonomous way. The main aim of this book is to highlight emerging applications and address recent breakthroughs in the domain of cognitive robotics and control and related areas. Procedures, algorithms, architectures, and implementations for reasoning, problem solving, or decision making are considered in the domain of robotics and control.