Brain for Robots
                         Invited talk at AIC 2014
                  November 26-27 University of Turin, Italy
                             http://aic2014.di.unito.it


                                    Giulio Sandini

                         IIT, Italian Institute of Technology,
                        Università degli Studi di Genova, Italy



       Abstract. Simulating and getting inspiration from biology is not a new
       endeavor in robotics [1]. However, the use of humanoid robots as tools
       to study human cognitive skills it is a relatively new area of the research
       which fully acknowledges the importance of embodiment and interaction
       (with the environment and with others) for the emergence of motor and
       perceptual skills, sensorimotor coordination, cognitive and social abil-
       ities [2]. Within this stream of research “developmental robotics” is a
       relatively new area of investigation where the guiding philosophy – and
       main motivation – is that cognition cannot be hand-coded but it has to
       be the result of a developmental process through which the system be-
       comes progressively more skilled and acquires the ability to understand
       events, contexts, and actions, initially dealing with immediate situations
       and increasingly acquiring a predictive capability [3]. The aim of this
       talk is to present the guiding philosophy – and main motivation – and to
       argue that, within this approach, robotics engineering and neuroscience
       research are mutually supportive by providing their own individual com-
       plementary investigation tools and methods: neuroscience from an “an-
       alytic” perspective and robotics from a “synthetic” one.


References
1. Atkeson, C.G., Hale, J.G., Pollick, F.E., Riley, M., Kotosaka, S., Schaul, S., Shi-
   bata, T., Tevatia, G., Ude, A., Vijayakumar, S., et al.: Using humanoid robots to
   study human behavior. IEEE Intelligent Systems and their applications 15(4), 46–56
   (2000)
2. Sandini, G., Metta, G., Konczak, J.: Human sensori-motor development and arti-
   ficial systems. In: Proc. of the Int. Symp. on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and
   Intellectual Human Activity Support for Applications. pp. 303–314 (1997)
3. Vernon, D., Metta, G., Sandini, G.: A survey of artificial cognitive systems: Im-
   plications for the autonomous development of mental capabilities in computational
   agents. Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Transactions on 11(2), 151–180 (2007)




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