New EU Cognitive Robot Project

Posted 14 Nov 2004 at 19:47 UTC by steve

There is a new four-year, 6.25 million European project to develop a cognitive robot capable of learning, internal representations, planning, understaning language meaning, and social interaction. According to a new ElectronicsWeekly.com article, researchers plan to put the robot together using the best existing AI components that have been developed to date for things like natural language, voice recognition, machine vision and other cognitive and sensory processes. Researchers at the Univeristy of Birmingham describe the process of combining all those bits and pieces into something that works as ambitious and hard. For more details on the project, see the EU Cognitive Systems Integrated Project website or the 9 page project summary (PDF format).

Cognitive robots, posted 14 Nov 2004 at 23:25 UTC by motters » (Master)

Sounds interesting and ambitious. I hope they make some progress in four years. However, I think it would be a mistake only to rely upon computer science experts. To make any real progress I think you would need to get people from neuroscience and psychology involved, who have at least a vague understanding of how real brains work.

The usual traps which such high profile projects fall into are:

- they become a gravy train for expensive consultants

- the temptation to invent yet another computer language, which never really solves anything (it just shifts the problems around a bit)

- adopting a top down divide and conquer approach to the problem, where each scientist narrowly concentrates upon solving some isolated problem without considering the overall architecture and functioning of the system

- general lack of imagination

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