Modular and hierarchical brain organization to understand assimilation, accommodation and their relation to autism in reaching tasks: a developmental robotics hypothesis

By "assimilation" the child embodies the sensorimotor experience into already built mental structures. Conversely, by "accommodation" these structures are changed according to the child\u27s new experiences. Despite the intuitive power of these concepts to trace the course of sensorimotor development, they have gradually lost ground in psychology. This likely for a lack of brain related views capturing the dynamic mechanisms underlying them. Here we propose that brain modular and hierarchical organization is crucial to understanding assimilation/accommodation. We devised an experiment where a bio-inspired modular and hierarchical mixture-of-experts model guides a simulated robot to learn by trial-and-error different reaching tasks. The model gives a novel interpretation of assimilation/accommodation based on the functional organization of the experts allocated through learning. Assimilation occurs when the model adapts a copy of the expert trained for solving a task to face another task requiring similar sensorimotor mappings. Experts storing similar sensorimotor mappings belong to the same functional module. Accommodation occurs when the model uses non-trained experts to face tasks requiring different sensorimotor mappings (generating a new functional group of experts). The model provides a new theoretical framework to investigate impairments in assimilation/accommodation the autistic syndrome

A modular bio-inspired architecture for movement generation for the infant-like robot iCub

Movement generation in humans appears to be processed through a three-layered architecture, where each layer corresponds to a different level of abstraction in the representation of the movement. In this article, we will present an architecture reflecting this three-layered organization and based on a modular approach to human movement generation. We will show that our architecture is well suited for the online generation and modulation of motor behaviors, but also for switching between motor behaviors. This will be illustrated respectively through an interactive drumming task and through switching between reaching and crawling

Integration of Action and Language Knowledge: A Roadmap for Developmental Robotics

“This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder." “Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.”This position paper proposes that the study of embodied cognitive agents, such as humanoid robots, can advance our understanding of the cognitive development of complex sensorimotor, linguistic, and social learning skills. This in turn will benefit the design of cognitive robots capable of learning to handle and manipulate objects and tools autonomously, to cooperate and communicate with other robots and humans, and to adapt their abilities to changing internal, environmental, and social conditions. Four key areas of research challenges are discussed, specifically for the issues related to the understanding of: 1) how agents learn and represent compositional actions; 2) how agents learn and represent compositional lexica; 3) the dynamics of social interaction and learning; and 4) how compositional action and language representations are integrated to bootstrap the cognitive system. The review of specific issues and progress in these areas is then translated into a practical roadmap based on a series of milestones. These milestones provide a possible set of cognitive robotics goals and test scenarios, thus acting as a research roadmap for future work on cognitive developmental robotics.Peer reviewe

Emotion in Future Intelligent Machines

Over the past decades, research in cognitive and affective neuroscience has emphasized that emotion is crucial for human intelligence and in fact inseparable from cognition. Concurrently, there has been a significantly growing interest in simulating and modeling emotion in robots and artificial agents. Yet, existing models of emotion and their integration in cognitive architectures remain quite limited and frequently disconnected from neuroscientific evidence. We argue that a stronger integration of emotion in robot models is critical for the design of intelligent machines capable of tackling real world problems. Drawing from current neuroscientific knowledge, we provide a set of guidelines for future research in artificial emotion and intelligent machines more generally

Model of Competencies for Decomposition of Human Behavior: Application to Control System of Robots

Humans and machines have shared the same physical space for many years. To share the same space, we want the robots to behave like human beings. This will facilitate their social integration, their interaction with humans and create an intelligent behavior. To achieve this goal, we need to understand how human behavior is generated, analyze tasks running our nerves and how they relate to them. Then and only then can we implement these mechanisms in robotic beings. In this study, we propose a model of competencies based on human neuroregulator system for analysis and decomposition of behavior into functional modules. Using this model allow separate and locate the tasks to be implemented in a robot that displays human-like behavior. As an example, we show the application of model to the autonomous movement behavior on unfamiliar environments and its implementation in various simulated and real robots with different physical configurations and physical devices of different nature. The main result of this study has been to build a model of competencies that is being used to build robotic systems capable of displaying behaviors similar to humans and consider the specific characteristics of robots

Laboratory on Legs: An Architechture for Adjustable Morphology with Legged Robots

For mobile robots, the essential units of actuation, computation, and sensing must be designed to fit within the body of the robot. Additional capabilities will largely depend upon a given activity, and should be easily reconfigurable to maximize the diversity of applications and experiments. To address this issue, we introduce a modular architecture originally developed and tested in the design and implementation of the X-RHex hexapod that allows the robot to operate as a mobile laboratory on legs. In the present paper we will introduce the specification, design and very earliest operational data of Canid, an actively driven compliant-spined quadruped whose completely different morphology and intended dynamical operating point are nevertheless built around exactly the same “Lab on Legs” actuation, computation, and sensing infrastructure. We will review as well, more briefly a second RHex variation, the XRL latform, built using the same components. For more information: Kod*La