26,496 research outputs found
The ITALK project : A developmental robotics approach to the study of individual, social, and linguistic learning
This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Frank Broz et al, āThe ITALK Project: A Developmental Robotics Approach to the Study of Individual, Social, and Linguistic Learningā, Topics in Cognitive Science, Vol 6(3): 534-544, June 2014, which has been published in final form at doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/tops.12099 This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving." Copyright Ā© 2014 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.This article presents results from a multidisciplinary research project on the integration and transfer of language knowledge into robots as an empirical paradigm for the study of language development in both humans and humanoid robots. Within the framework of human linguistic and cognitive development, we focus on how three central types of learning interact and co-develop: individual learning about one's own embodiment and the environment, social learning (learning from others), and learning of linguistic capability. Our primary concern is how these capabilities can scaffold each other's development in a continuous feedback cycle as their interactions yield increasingly sophisticated competencies in the agent's capacity to interact with others and manipulate its world. Experimental results are summarized in relation to milestones in human linguistic and cognitive development and show that the mutual scaffolding of social learning, individual learning, and linguistic capabilities creates the context, conditions, and requisites for learning in each domain. Challenges and insights identified as a result of this research program are discussed with regard to possible and actual contributions to cognitive science and language ontogeny. In conclusion, directions for future work are suggested that continue to develop this approach toward an integrated framework for understanding these mutually scaffolding processes as a basis for language development in humans and robots.Peer reviewe
Introduction: The Third International Conference on Epigenetic Robotics
This paper summarizes the paper and poster contributions
to the Third International Workshop on
Epigenetic Robotics. The focus of this workshop is
on the cross-disciplinary interaction of developmental
psychology and robotics. Namely, the general
goal in this area is to create robotic models of the
psychological development of various behaviors. The
term "epigenetic" is used in much the same sense as
the term "developmental" and while we could call
our topic "developmental robotics", developmental
robotics can be seen as having a broader interdisciplinary
emphasis. Our focus in this workshop is
on the interaction of developmental psychology and
robotics and we use the phrase "epigenetic robotics"
to capture this focus
Towards Active Event Recognition
Directing robot attention to recognise activities and to anticipate events like goal-directed actions is a crucial skill for human-robot interaction. Unfortunately, issues like intrinsic time constraints, the spatially distributed nature of the entailed information sources, and the existence of a multitude of unobservable states affecting the system, like latent intentions, have long rendered achievement of such skills a rather elusive goal. The problem tests the limits of current attention control systems. It requires an integrated solution for tracking, exploration and recognition, which traditionally have been seen as separate problems in active vision.We propose a probabilistic generative framework based on a mixture of Kalman filters and information gain maximisation that uses predictions in both recognition and attention-control. This framework can efficiently use the observations of one element in a dynamic environment to provide information on other elements, and consequently enables guided exploration.Interestingly, the sensors-control policy, directly derived from first principles, represents the intuitive trade-off between finding the most discriminative clues and maintaining overall awareness.Experiments on a simulated humanoid robot observing a human executing goal-oriented actions demonstrated improvement on recognition time and precision over baseline systems
Dance Teaching by a Robot: Combining Cognitive and Physical Human-Robot Interaction for Supporting the Skill Learning Process
This letter presents a physical human-robot interaction scenario in which a
robot guides and performs the role of a teacher within a defined dance training
framework. A combined cognitive and physical feedback of performance is
proposed for assisting the skill learning process. Direct contact cooperation
has been designed through an adaptive impedance-based controller that adjusts
according to the partner's performance in the task. In measuring performance, a
scoring system has been designed using the concept of progressive teaching
(PT). The system adjusts the difficulty based on the user's number of practices
and performance history. Using the proposed method and a baseline constant
controller, comparative experiments have shown that the PT presents better
performance in the initial stage of skill learning. An analysis of the
subjects' perception of comfort, peace of mind, and robot performance have
shown a significant difference at the p < .01 level, favoring the PT algorithm.Comment: Presented at IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
ICRA-201
Social Attention: Modeling Attention in Human Crowds
Robots that navigate through human crowds need to be able to plan safe,
efficient, and human predictable trajectories. This is a particularly
challenging problem as it requires the robot to predict future human
trajectories within a crowd where everyone implicitly cooperates with each
other to avoid collisions. Previous approaches to human trajectory prediction
have modeled the interactions between humans as a function of proximity.
However, that is not necessarily true as some people in our immediate vicinity
moving in the same direction might not be as important as other people that are
further away, but that might collide with us in the future. In this work, we
propose Social Attention, a novel trajectory prediction model that captures the
relative importance of each person when navigating in the crowd, irrespective
of their proximity. We demonstrate the performance of our method against a
state-of-the-art approach on two publicly available crowd datasets and analyze
the trained attention model to gain a better understanding of which surrounding
agents humans attend to, when navigating in a crowd
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