The role of attention in robot self-awareness

A robot may not be truly self-aware even though it can have some characteristics of self-awareness, such as having emotional states or the ability to recognize itself in the mirror. We define self-awareness in robots to be characterized by the capacity to direct attention toward their own mental state. This paper explores robot self-awareness and the role that attention plays in the achievement self-awareness. We propose a new attention based approach to self-awareness called ASMO and conduct a comparative analysis of approaches that highlights the innovation and benefits of ASMO. We then describe how our attention based self-awareness can be designed and used to develop self-awareness in state-of-the-art humanoidal robots. © 2009 IEEE

Grounded representation driven robot motion design

Grounding robot representations is an important problem in Artificial Intelligence. In this paper we show how a new grounding framework guided the development of an improved locomotion engine [3] for the AIBO. The improvements stemmed from higher quality representations that were grounded better than those in the previous system [1]. Since the AIBO is more grounded under the new locomotion engine it makes better decisions and achieves its design goals more efficiently. Furthermore, a well grounded robot offers significant software engineering benefits since its behaviours can be developed, debugged and tested more effectively. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg