Emergence of communication in embodied agents: Co-adapting communicative and non-communicative behaviours

In this paper I discuss in which conditions a population of embodied and situated agents that have to solve problems that requires cooperation might develop forms of ritualized interaction and communication. After reviewing the most relevant literature I will try to identify the the main open research problems and the most promising research directions. More specifially I will discuss: (a) the type of problems, the agents’ characteristics, and the environmental/social conditions that might facilitate the emergence of an ability to interact and communicate, and (b) the behavioral and cognitive capabilities that are crucial for the development of forms of communication of different complexity. 1

Learning Collaborative Foraging in a Swarm of Robots using Embodied Evolution

International audienceIn this paper, we study how a swarm of robots adapts over time to solve a collaborative task using a distributed Embodied Evolutionary approach , where each robot runs an evolutionary algorithm and they locally exchange genomes and fitness values. Particularly, we study a collabo-rative foraging task, where the robots are rewarded for collecting food items that are too heavy to be collected individually and need at least two robots to be collected. Further, the robots also need to display a signal matching the color of the item with an additional effector. Our experiments show that the distributed algorithm is able to evolve swarm behavior to collect items cooperatively. The experiments also reveal that effective cooperation is evolved due mostly to the ability of robots to jointly reach food items, while learning to display the right color that matches the item is done suboptimally. However, a closer analysis shows that, without a mechanism to avoid neglecting any kind of item, robots collect all of them, which means that there is some degree of learning to choose the right value for the color effector depending on the situation

Who is the learder? Dynamic role allocation through communication in a population of homogeneous robots

The field of collective robotics has been raising increasing interest in the last few years. In the vast majority of works devoted to collective robotics robots play all the same function, while less attention has been paid to groups of robots with different roles (teams). In this paper we evolve a population of homogeneous robots for dynamically allocating roles through bodily and communicative interactions. Evolved solutions are not only able to efficiently decide who is the leader, but are also robust to changes in team\u27s size, demonstrating the ability of Evolutionary Robotics to find efficient and robust solution to difficult design challenges by relying on selforganizing principles. Our evolved system might be used for improving robots\u27 performance in all the cases in which robots have to accomplish collective tasks for which the presence of a leader might be useful

Evolutionary Robotics

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Evolving homogeneous neuro-controllers for a group of heterogeneous robots: coordinated motion, cooperation, and acoustic communication

SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Cognition and the Web

Empirical research related to the Web has typically focused on its impact to social relationships and wider society; however, the cognitive impact of the Web is also an increasing focus of scientific interest and research attention. In this paper, I attempt to provide an overview of what I see as the important issues in the debate regarding the relationship between human cognition and the Web. I argue that the Web is potentially poised to transform our cognitive and epistemic profiles, but that in order to understand the nature of this influence we need to countenance a position that factors in the available scientific evidence, the changing nature of our interaction with the Web, and the possibility that many of our everyday cognitive achievements rely on complex webs of social and technological scaffolding. I review the literature relating to the cognitive effects of current Web technology, and I attempt to anticipate the cognitive impact of next-generation technologies, such as Web-based augmented reality systems and the transition to data-centric modes of information representation. I suggest that additional work is required to more fully understand the cognitive impact of both current and future Web technologies, and I identify some of the issues for future scientific work in this area. Given that recent scientific effort around the Web has coalesced into a new scientific discipline, namely that of Web Science, I suggest that many of the issues related to cognition and the Web could form part of the emerging Web Science research agenda