The CORTEX Cognitive Robotics Architecture: use cases

CORTEX is a cognitive robotics architecture inspired by three key ideas: modularity, internal modelling and graph representations. CORTEX is also a computational framework designed to support early forms of intelligence in real world, human interacting robots, by selecting an a priori functional decomposition of the capabilities of the robot. This set of abilities was then translated to computational modules or agents, each one built as a network of software interconnected components. The nature of these agents can range from pure reactive modules connected to sensors and/or actuators, to pure deliberative ones, but they can only communicate with each other through a graph structure called Deep State Representation (DSR). DSR is a short-term dynamic representation of the space surrounding the robot, the objects and the humans in it, and the robot itself. All these entities are perceived and transformed into different levels of abstraction, ranging from geometric data to high-level symbolic relations such as "the person is talking and gazing at me". The combination of symbolic and geometric information endows the architecture with the potential to simulate and anticipate the outcome of the actions executed by the robot. In this paper we present recent advances in the CORTEX architecture and several real-world human-robot interaction scenarios in which they have been tested. We describe our interpretation of the ideas inspiring the architecture and the reasons why this specific computational framework is a promising architecture for the social robots of tomorrow

RoboARCH: An autonomous robot for analysis and documentation of historical architectures

The Mediterranean basin has an impressive amount of millenarian urban structures which have been modelled along centuries. Unfortunately, they are sometimes damaged due to both the passage of time as well as bad preservation criteria. In order to avoid these situations or reduce their effects, new preservation criteria have arisen in the last decades. These criteria aim to revitalize the historical value of these architectural remains from a cultural and economic perspective. In this line of research, the “Archaeology of Architecture” applies the theoretical principles of the archaeology to study buildings and streets, offering new methodologies of analysis. An important part of these methodologies incorporates new technologies, such as 3D scanners, robotic total stations, or virtual and augmented reality, to the data acquisition and processing tasks. The application of these technologies in the area of Historical Heritage results in a breakthrough in the graphic documentation of monuments and archaeological remains, which allows the development of new preservation strategies. Among all these new technologies, this abstract proposes the use of an autonomous robot to help identifying elements inside a building. The robot navigates through the environment, collects data and compares them against well-known historical and architectural archetypes, to find a set of candidates for each perceived pattern. The advantages of the proposed system when compared against current state-of-the-art techniques are the following: (i) the robot explores the environment autonomously using SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) algorithms and acquires colour and depth information; (ii) no special markers, such as the targets or spheres usually employed by robotic total stations, are required; (iii) the system uses advanced image processing methods to automatically provide a first characterization of perceived borders, that will help in different identification processes, from single elements to more complex structures; (iv) obtained data are compared against historical and architectural archetypes included in a data base; (v) evaluation of the object position inside the stratigraphic sequence of the wall.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Testing a fully autonomous robotic salesman in real scenarios

Over the past decades, the number of robots deployed in museums, trade shows and exhibitions have grown steadily. This new application domain has become a key research topic in the robotics community. Therefore, new robots are designed to interact with people in these domains, using natural and intuitive channels. Visual perception and speech processing have to be considered for these robots, as they should be able to detect people in their environment, recognize their degree of accessibility and engage them in social conversations. They also need to safely navigate around dynamic, uncontrolled environments. They must be equipped with planning and learning components, that allow them to adapt to different scenarios. Finally, they must attract the attention of the people, be kind and safe to interact with. In this paper, we describe our experience with Gualzru, a salesman robot endowed with the cognitive architecture RoboCog. This architecture synchronizes all previous processes in a social robot, using a common inner representation as the core of the system. The robot has been tested in crowded, public daily life environments, where it interacted with people that had never seen it before nor had a clue about its functionality. Experimental results presented in this paper demonstrate the capabilities of the robot and its limitations in these real scenarios, and define future improvement actions.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

The cognitive architecture of a robotic salesman

This paper describes a robotics cognitive architecture for social robots named CORTEX. This architecture integrates di fferent levels of abstraction (from basic geometry to high-level predicates) into a unique Deep Space Representation (DSR) that diff erent agents interface. These agents update the contents of the DSR with new data from the outer world, and execute, plan and design behaviours. The design of CORTEX as an unified deep representation allows to fit both the subsymbolic processing and exibility requirements of robot control. In this paper a first implementation of CORTEX has been integrated into Gualzru, a robotic salesman, and tested in real scenarios. Results show that this cognitive architecture allows this robot to adequately execute its use case, and that it has a promising adaptability to achieve new tasks and be used in new scenarios.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Percepts symbols or Action symbols? Generalizing how all modules interact within a software architecture for cognitive robotics

Robots require a close coupling of perception and action. Cognitive robots go beyond this to require a further coupling with cognition. From the perspective of robotics, this coupling generally emphasizes a tightly integrated perceptuomotor system, which is then loosely connected to some limited form of cognitive system such as a planner. At the other end, from the perspective of automated planning, the emphasis is on a highly functional system that, taken to its extreme, calls perceptual and motor modules as independent functions. This paper proposes to join both perspectives through a unique representation where the responses of all modules on the software architecture (percepts or actions) are grounded using the same set of symbols. This allows to generalize the signal-to-symbol divide that separates classic perceptuomotor and automated planning systems, being the result a software architecture where all software modules interact using the same tokens.This paper has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-65686-C5 and FEDER funds and by the FP7 EU project ECHORD++ grant 601116 (CLARK project)

A General-Purpose Architecture to Control Mobile Robots

This paper at: 15th Workshop of Physical Agent. at took place, June 12 and 13, 2014 in León (Spain)Complex robotic tasks require the coordination of a considerable amount of skills. This is generally achieved generating and executing action plans that fulfill the preconditions of the given objective. These tasks can be highly dynamic, since the appearance of new objects or unexpected situations is a constant during the plan execution. In this context, robot control systems require the capability of managing a suitable world model (creating, removing or retyping dynamically objects as a result of the plan execution), and the capability of monitoring and replanning when unexpected situations are detected. In this paper we introduce a general-purpose architecture for autonomous mobile robots providing these features. The architecture allows to generate planning applications since it integrates planning, re-planning, monitoring and learning capabilities, and, at the same time, manages a consistent graph-like world model. Finally, we present some preliminary results of the deployment of such architecture in an advertisement promoting robot domain.This paper has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2012-TIN2012-38079 and FEDER funds, and by the Innterconecta Programme 2011 project ITC-20111030 ADAPTA.Publicad

Perceptions or Actions? Grounding How Agents Interact Within a Software Architecture for Cognitive Robotics

One of the aims of cognitive robotics is to endow robots with the ability to plan solutions for complex goals and then to enact those plans. Additionally, robots should react properly upon encountering unexpected changes in their environment that are not part of their planned course of actions. This requires a close coupling between deliberative and reactive control flows. From the perspective of robotics, this coupling generally entails a tightly integrated perceptuomotor system, which is then loosely connected to some specific form of deliberative system such as a planner. From the high-level perspective of automated planning, the emphasis is on a highly functional system that, taken to its extreme, calls perceptual and motor modules as services when required. This paper proposes to join the perceptual and acting perspectives via a unique representation where the responses of all software modules in the architecture are generalized using the same set of tokens. The proposed representation integrates symbolic and metric information. The proposed approach has been successfully tested in CLARC, a robot that performs Comprehensive Geriatric Assessments of elderly patients. The robot was favourably appraised in a survey conducted to assess its behaviour. For instance, using a 5-point Likert scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), patients reported an average of 4.86 when asked if they felt confident during the interaction with the robot. This paper proposes a mechanism for bringing the perceptual and acting perspectives closer within a distributed robotics architecture. The idea is built on top of the blackboard model and scene graphs. The modules in our proposal communicate using a short-term memory, writing the perceptual information they need to share with other agents and accessing the information they need for determining the next goals to address

CLARC: A cognitive robot for helping geriatric doctors in real scenarios

Third Iberian Robotics Conference (ROBOT 2017). 22 to 24 November 2017, Seville, SpainAbstract: Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (CGA) is an integrated clinical process to evaluate the frailty of elderly persons in order to create therapy plans that improve their quality of life. For robotizing these tests, we are designing and developing CLARC, a mobile robot able to help the physician to capture and manage data during the CGA procedures, mainly by autonomously conducting a set of predefined evaluation tests. Built around a shared internal representation of the outer world, the architecture is composed of software modules able to plan and generate a stream of actions, to execute actions emanated from the representation or to update this by including/removing items at different abstraction levels. Percepts, actions and intentions coming from all software modules are grounded within this unique representation. This allows the robot to react to unexpected events and to modify the course of action according to the dynamics of a scenario built around the interaction with the patient. The paper describes the architecture of the system as well as the preliminary user studies and evaluation to gather new user requirements.This work has been partially funded by the EU ECHORD++ project (FP7-ICT-601116) and the TIN2015-65686-C5-1-R (MINECO and FEDER funds). Javier García is partially supported by the Comunidad de Madrid (Spain) funds under the project 2016-T2/TIC-171

Unravelling Hominin Activities in the Zooarchaeological Assemblage of Barranco Leon (Orce, Granada, Spain)

Little is known about the subsistence practices of the first European settlers, mainly due to the shortage of archaeological sites in Europe older than a million years. This article contributes to the knowledge of the subsistence of the first Europeans with new zooarchaeology and taphonomic data from the Palaeolithic site of Barranco Leon (Orce, Granada, Spain). We present the results of the analysis of the faunal assemblages retrieved in the context of new excavations undertaken between 2016 and 2020. We have followed a standard methodology for the identification and quantification of species, mortality profiles, skeletal representation and taphonomic analysis. With regard to the taphonomic evidence, we have documented the extent of rounding, abrasion and other alterations. Finally, we examined traces from the activities of carnivores and hominins that led to the accumulation and alteration of the bone assemblages. Results indicate that the archaeo-paleontological deposits from Barranco Leon present a dual-patterned mixed taphonomic origin. The first phase primarily involved waterborne processes (BL-D1), which led to the accumulation of lithic raw materials, a few archaeological stone tools, and some faunal remains with percussion and cutmarks. The second phase (BL-D2) contains several stone tools associated with faunal remains with more anthropogenic alterations, such as cutmarks and percussion marks. After analysing the Barranco Leon zooarchaeological assemblage, the present study concludes that hominins had access to the meat and within-bone nutrients of animals of diverse sizes. However, the specific carcass acquisition mechanisms that hominins followed are less certain because the presence of tooth marks suggests that carnivores also played a role in the accumulation and modification of the Barranco Leon faunal assemblage.Peer reviewe