First steps toward artificial culture in robot societies

This poster abstract outlines initial results from a multi-disciplinary research project called ‘the emergence of artificial culture in robot societies’ whose overall aim is to investigate the processes and mechanisms by which protocultural behaviours, better described as traditions, might emerge in a free running collective robot system. We accept, as a working hypothesis, the idea that mimesis and embodiment are essential pre-requisites for cultural evolution [1]. It follows that since our aim is to demonstrate artificial culture we need a system of embodied artificial agents, i.e. robots, in which robots are able to learn socially from each other, by imitation. This group of robots, which we call ‘Copybots’ (after [1] pp106-107), require an environment in which behaviours can be copied, by imitation, from one robot to another and we refer to this environment as the ‘artificial culture lab’