Symbol Emergence in Robotics: A Survey

Humans can learn the use of language through physical interaction with their environment and semiotic communication with other people. It is very important to obtain a computational understanding of how humans can form a symbol system and obtain semiotic skills through their autonomous mental development. Recently, many studies have been conducted on the construction of robotic systems and machine-learning methods that can learn the use of language through embodied multimodal interaction with their environment and other systems. Understanding human social interactions and developing a robot that can smoothly communicate with human users in the long term, requires an understanding of the dynamics of symbol systems and is crucially important. The embodied cognition and social interaction of participants gradually change a symbol system in a constructive manner. In this paper, we introduce a field of research called symbol emergence in robotics (SER). SER is a constructive approach towards an emergent symbol system. The emergent symbol system is socially self-organized through both semiotic communications and physical interactions with autonomous cognitive developmental agents, i.e., humans and developmental robots. Specifically, we describe some state-of-art research topics concerning SER, e.g., multimodal categorization, word discovery, and a double articulation analysis, that enable a robot to obtain words and their embodied meanings from raw sensory--motor information, including visual information, haptic information, auditory information, and acoustic speech signals, in a totally unsupervised manner. Finally, we suggest future directions of research in SER.Comment: submitted to Advanced Robotic

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

Motion Switching with Sensory and Instruction Signals by designing Dynamical Systems using Deep Neural Network

To ensure that a robot is able to accomplish an extensive range of tasks, it is necessary to achieve a flexible combination of multiple behaviors. This is because the design of task motions suited to each situation would become increasingly difficult as the number of situations and the types of tasks performed by them increase. To handle the switching and combination of multiple behaviors, we propose a method to design dynamical systems based on point attractors that accept (i) "instruction signals" for instruction-driven switching. We incorporate the (ii) "instruction phase" to form a point attractor and divide the target task into multiple subtasks. By forming an instruction phase that consists of point attractors, the model embeds a subtask in the form of trajectory dynamics that can be manipulated using sensory and instruction signals. Our model comprises two deep neural networks: a convolutional autoencoder and a multiple time-scale recurrent neural network. In this study, we apply the proposed method to manipulate soft materials. To evaluate our model, we design a cloth-folding task that consists of four subtasks and three patterns of instruction signals, which indicate the direction of motion. The results depict that the robot can perform the required task by combining subtasks based on sensory and instruction signals. And, our model determined the relations among these signals using its internal dynamics.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in RA-L. An accompanied video is available at this https://youtu.be/a73KFtOOB5