Experiments in artificial culture: from noisy imitation to storytelling robots

This paper presents a series of experiments in collective social robotics, spanning more than 10 years, with the long-term aim of building embodied models of (aspects) of cultural evolution. Initial experiments demonstrated the emergence of behavioural traditions in a group of social robots programmed to imitate each other's behaviours (we call these Copybots). These experiments show that the noisy (i.e. less than perfect fidelity) imitation that comes for free with real physical robots gives rise naturally to variation in social learning. More recent experimental work extends the robots' cognitive capabilities with simulation-based internal models, equipping them with a simple artificial theory of mind. With this extended capability we explore, in our current work, social learning not via imitation but robot-robot storytelling, in an effort to model this very human mode of cultural transmission. In this paper we give an account of the methods and inspiration for these experiments,the experiments and their results, and an outline of possible directions for this programme of research. It is our hope that this paper stimulates not only discussion but suggestions for hypotheses to test with the Storybots

First steps toward artificial culture in robot societies

This poster abstract outlines initial results from a multi-disciplinary research project called ‘the emergence of artificial culture in robot societies’ whose overall aim is to investigate the processes and mechanisms by which protocultural behaviours, better described as traditions, might emerge in a free running collective robot system. We accept, as a working hypothesis, the idea that mimesis and embodiment are essential pre-requisites for cultural evolution [1]. It follows that since our aim is to demonstrate artificial culture we need a system of embodied artificial agents, i.e. robots, in which robots are able to learn socially from each other, by imitation. This group of robots, which we call ‘Copybots’ (after [1] pp106-107), require an environment in which behaviours can be copied, by imitation, from one robot to another and we refer to this environment as the ‘artificial culture lab’