Blockchain Solutions for Multi-Agent Robotic Systems: Related Work and Open Questions

The possibilities of decentralization and immutability make blockchain probably one of the most breakthrough and promising technological innovations in recent years. This paper presents an overview, analysis, and classification of possible blockchain solutions for practical tasks facing multi-agent robotic systems. The paper discusses blockchain-based applications that demonstrate how distributed ledger can be used to extend the existing number of research platforms and libraries for multi-agent robotic systems.Comment: 5 pages, FRUCT-2019 conference pape

Social Cognition for Human-Robot Symbiosis—Challenges and Building Blocks

The next generation of robot companions or robot working partners will need to satisfy social requirements somehow similar to the famous laws of robotics envisaged by Isaac Asimov time ago (Asimov, 1942). The necessary technology has almost reached the required level, including sensors and actuators, but the cognitive organization is still in its infancy and is only partially supported by the current understanding of brain cognitive processes. The brain of symbiotic robots will certainly not be a “positronic” replica of the human brain: probably, the greatest part of it will be a set of interacting computational processes running in the cloud. In this article, we review the challenges that must be met in the design of a set of interacting computational processes as building blocks of a cognitive architecture that may give symbiotic capabilities to collaborative robots of the next decades: (1) an animated body-schema; (2) an imitation machinery; (3) a motor intentions machinery; (4) a set of physical interaction mechanisms; and (5) a shared memory system for incremental symbiotic development. We would like to stress that our approach is totally un-hierarchical: the five building blocks of the shared cognitive architecture are fully bi-directionally connected. For example, imitation and intentional processes require the “services” of the animated body schema which, on the other hand, can run its simulations if appropriately prompted by imitation and/or intention, with or without physical interaction. Successful experiences can leave a trace in the shared memory system and chunks of memory fragment may compete to participate to novel cooperative actions. And so on and so forth. At the heart of the system is lifelong training and learning but, different from the conventional learning paradigms in neural networks, where learning is somehow passively imposed by an external agent, in symbiotic robots there is an element of free choice of what is worth learning, driven by the interaction between the robot and the human partner. The proposed set of building blocks is certainly a rough approximation of what is needed by symbiotic robots but we believe it is a useful starting point for building a computational framework

Embodied Evolution in Collective Robotics: A Review

This paper provides an overview of evolutionary robotics techniques applied to on-line distributed evolution for robot collectives -- namely, embodied evolution. It provides a definition of embodied evolution as well as a thorough description of the underlying concepts and mechanisms. The paper also presents a comprehensive summary of research published in the field since its inception (1999-2017), providing various perspectives to identify the major trends. In particular, we identify a shift from considering embodied evolution as a parallel search method within small robot collectives (fewer than 10 robots) to embodied evolution as an on-line distributed learning method for designing collective behaviours in swarm-like collectives. The paper concludes with a discussion of applications and open questions, providing a milestone for past and an inspiration for future research.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl