Development of Cognitive Capabilities in Humanoid Robots

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/645 on 03.04.2017 by CS (TIS)Building intelligent systems with human level of competence is the ultimate grand challenge for science and technology in general, and especially for the computational intelligence community. Recent theories in autonomous cognitive systems have focused on the close integration (grounding) of communication with perception, categorisation and action. Cognitive systems are essential for integrated multi-platform systems that are capable of sensing and communicating. This thesis presents a cognitive system for a humanoid robot that integrates abilities such as object detection and recognition, which are merged with natural language understanding and refined motor controls. The work includes three studies; (1) the use of generic manipulation of objects using the NMFT algorithm, by successfully testing the extension of the NMFT to control robot behaviour; (2) a study of the development of a robotic simulator; (3) robotic simulation experiments showing that a humanoid robot is able to acquire complex behavioural, cognitive, and linguistic skills through individual and social learning. The robot is able to learn to handle and manipulate objects autonomously, to cooperate with human users, and to adapt its abilities to changes in internal and environmental conditions. The model and the experimental results reported in this thesis, emphasise the importance of embodied cognition, i.e. the humanoid robot's physical interaction between its body and the environment

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

GPU Computing for Cognitive Robotics

This thesis presents the first investigation of the impact of GPU computing on cognitive robotics by providing a series of novel experiments in the area of action and language acquisition in humanoid robots and computer vision. Cognitive robotics is concerned with endowing robots with high-level cognitive capabilities to enable the achievement of complex goals in complex environments. Reaching the ultimate goal of developing cognitive robots will require tremendous amounts of computational power, which was until recently provided mostly by standard CPU processors. CPU cores are optimised for serial code execution at the expense of parallel execution, which renders them relatively inefficient when it comes to high-performance computing applications. The ever-increasing market demand for high-performance, real-time 3D graphics has evolved the GPU into a highly parallel, multithreaded, many-core processor extraordinary computational power and very high memory bandwidth. These vast computational resources of modern GPUs can now be used by the most of the cognitive robotics models as they tend to be inherently parallel. Various interesting and insightful cognitive models were developed and addressed important scientific questions concerning action-language acquisition and computer vision. While they have provided us with important scientific insights, their complexity and application has not improved much over the last years. The experimental tasks as well as the scale of these models are often minimised to avoid excessive training times that grow exponentially with the number of neurons and the training data. This impedes further progress and development of complex neurocontrollers that would be able to take the cognitive robotics research a step closer to reaching the ultimate goal of creating intelligent machines. This thesis presents several cases where the application of the GPU computing on cognitive robotics algorithms resulted in the development of large-scale neurocontrollers of previously unseen complexity enabling the conducting of the novel experiments described herein.European Commission Seventh Framework Programm

An investigation into adaptive power reduction techniques for neural hardware

In light of the growing applicability of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) in the signal processing field [1] and the present thrust of the semiconductor industry towards lowpower SOCs for mobile devices [2], the power consumption of ANN hardware has become a very important implementation issue. Adaptability is a powerful and useful feature of neural networks. All current approaches for low-power ANN hardware techniques are ‘non-adaptive’ with respect to the power consumption of the network (i.e. power-reduction is not an objective of the adaptation/learning process). In the research work presented in this thesis, investigations on possible adaptive power reduction techniques have been carried out, which attempt to exploit the adaptability of neural networks in order to reduce the power consumption. Three separate approaches for such adaptive power reduction are proposed: adaptation of size, adaptation of network weights and adaptation of calculation precision. Initial case studies exhibit promising results with significantpower reduction

Pattern Recognition

A wealth of advanced pattern recognition algorithms are emerging from the interdiscipline between technologies of effective visual features and the human-brain cognition process. Effective visual features are made possible through the rapid developments in appropriate sensor equipments, novel filter designs, and viable information processing architectures. While the understanding of human-brain cognition process broadens the way in which the computer can perform pattern recognition tasks. The present book is intended to collect representative researches around the globe focusing on low-level vision, filter design, features and image descriptors, data mining and analysis, and biologically inspired algorithms. The 27 chapters coved in this book disclose recent advances and new ideas in promoting the techniques, technology and applications of pattern recognition

The Development of Bio-Inspired Cortical Feature Maps for Robot Sensorimotor Controllers

Full version unavailable due to 3rd party copyright restrictions.This project applies principles from the field of Computational Neuroscience to Robotics research, in particular to develop systems inspired by how nature manages to solve sensorimotor coordination tasks. The overall aim has been to build a self-organising sensorimotor system using biologically inspired techniques based upon human cortical development which can in the future be implemented in neuromorphic hardware. This can then deliver the benefits of low power consumption and real time operation but with flexible learning onboard autonomous robots. A core principle is the Self-Organising Feature Map which is based upon the theory of how 2D maps develop in real cortex to represent complex information from the environment. A framework for developing feature maps for both motor and visual directional selectivity representing eight different directions of motion is described as well as how they can be coupled together to make a basic visuomotor system. In contrast to many previous works which use artificially generated visual inputs (for example, image sequences of oriented moving bars or mathematically generated Gaussian bars) a novel feature of the current work is that the visual input is generated by a DVS 128 silicon retina camera which is a neuromorphic device and produces spike events in a frame-free way. One of the main contributions of this work has been to develop a method of autonomous regulation of the map development process which adapts the learning dependent upon input activity. The main results show that distinct directionally selective maps for both the motor and visual modalities are produced under a range of experimental scenarios. The adaptive learning process successfully controls the rate of learning in both motor and visual map development and is used to indicate when sufficient patterns have been presented, thus avoiding the need to define in advance the quantity and range of training data. The coupling training experiments show that the visual input learns to modulate the original motor map response, creating a new visual-motor topological map.EPSRC, University of Plymouth Graduate Schoo

Peripersonal Space in the Humanoid Robot iCub

Developing behaviours for interaction with objects close to the body is a primary goal for any organism to survive in the world. Being able to develop such behaviours will be an essential feature in autonomous humanoid robots in order to improve their integration into human environments. Adaptable spatial abilities will make robots safer and improve their social skills, human-robot and robot-robot collaboration abilities. This work investigated how a humanoid robot can explore and create action-based representations of its peripersonal space, the region immediately surrounding the body where reaching is possible without location displacement. It presents three empirical studies based on peripersonal space findings from psychology, neuroscience and robotics. The experiments used a visual perception system based on active-vision and biologically inspired neural networks. The first study investigated the contribution of binocular vision in a reaching task. Results indicated the signal from vergence is a useful embodied depth estimation cue in the peripersonal space in humanoid robots. The second study explored the influence of morphology and postural experience on confidence levels in reaching assessment. Results showed that a decrease of confidence when assessing targets located farther from the body, possibly in accordance to errors in depth estimation from vergence for longer distances. Additionally, it was found that a proprioceptive arm-length signal extends the robot’s peripersonal space. The last experiment modelled development of the reaching skill by implementing motor synergies that progressively unlock degrees of freedom in the arm. The model was advantageous when compared to one that included no developmental stages. The contribution to knowledge of this work is extending the research on biologically-inspired methods for building robots, presenting new ways to further investigate the robotic properties involved in the dynamical adaptation to body and sensing characteristics, vision-based action, morphology and confidence levels in reaching assessment.CONACyT, Mexico (National Council of Science and Technology