The emerging viewpoint of embodied cognition holds that cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body’s interactions with the world. This position actually houses a number of distinct claims, some of which are more controversial than others. This paper distinguishes and evaluates the following six claims: 1) cognition is situated; 2) cognition is time-pressured; 3) we off-load cognitive work onto the environment; 4) the environment is part of the cognitive system; 5) cognition is for action; 6) off-line cognition is body-based. Of these, the first three and the fifth appear to be at least partially true, and their usefulness is best evaluated in terms of the range of their applicability. The fourth claim, I argue, is deeply problematic. The sixth claim has received the least attention in the literature on embodied cognition, but it may in fact be the best documented and most powerful of the six claims.

this paper we investigate the claim that complex causal interactions cause trouble for the notion of inner representational vehicles. We review some of the cases supposed to put pressure on a representational-vehicle based understanding and conclude that the threat, even in these ongoing, interactive cases, is more apparent than real. The main contribution of the present paper, however, is to go beyond this negative thesis

This paper deals with self-localization of a mobile robot on the condition that no a-priori knowledge about the environment is available. The applied method features to be accurate, robust, independent of any artificial landmarks and feasible with such a moderate computational effort that all necessary tasks can be executed in real-time on a standard PC. The perception system used is a panorama laser range finder (PLRF) which takes scans of its present environment. A modified Dynamic Programming (DP) algorithm provides pattern matching and pattern recognition on the preprocessed panorama scans and thereby renders a qualitative fusion of the sensory data. For an exact quantitative estimate of the robot's current position, a robust localization module is employed. The knowledge gained about the environment along that way is stored in a self-growing, graph based map which combines geometrical information and topological restrictions. Preliminary experiments in a common office environment ...

The Sensory Ego-Sphere (SES) is a shortterm memory structure for a robot. The SES records and recalls events that are localized in space or time. It is a database structured as a 2D spherical shell centered on the coordinate frame of the robot, spatially indexed by polar and azimuthal angles. In this paper the geometry and data structure of the SES are described. Motion transformations of the SES are given. The aspects of the SES characteristic of a humanoid are discussed. It is shown how the SES (1) fuses sensory data via spatiotemporal coincidence, (2) recalls the previous position of a specific object in relation to the robot and to other objects, and (3) facilitates localization of the robot with respect to known landmarks. The use of the SES on two humanoids, ISAC at Vanderbilt University and Robonaut at NASA Johnson Space Center, is described.

A report on the development of a software architecture to facilitate interactions between a person and a humanoid robot is given. The architecture employs independent, asynchronous software agents that run in parallel on a set of PCs in a local area network. It comprises four major components: a Self Agent which controls the robot's general interactions with the world and monitors its own status, a human agent which models the person and controls the robot's interaction with her or him, a spatiotemporal short-term memory called the Sensory EgoSphere, and a long-term memory called the DataBase Associative Memory. The structures of these components and a description of their interactions is given. Current research efforts in learning and emotion are described. Outstanding problems are listed. Keywords-- Robotics, Humanoids, Software agents, Affective Computing, Kansei, Sensory Ego-Sphere. 1.

We define autonomy as the capability of a system to use at any time the actual circumstances to serve its purpose. This definition requires the capability both to react to the actual circumstances and to control these reactions in order to fulfill the goals. The reactiveness is achieved by a set of behaviors. The directedness is achieved by a cognitive layer structuring and exploiting the system history. A distributed architecture of such an autonomous system is presented and discussed. I. INTRODUCTION We define autonomy as the capability of a system to use at any time the actual circumstances to serve its purpose (survival for biological systems, any functionality or role for artificial systems). The definition of autonomy requires a compromise between: - behaving in a situated way, that is in the context of the particular, concrete circumstances, otherwise it would not be able to deal with the dynamics of the world - behaving in order to ensure its survival or its role otherwise it w...

This work is dedicated to mobile robot navigation. It presents a solution to the navigation problem using a simple world model based on a new approach to behaviours' mapping. This new theory of behaviours' mapping proposes a general solution not only to mobile robots' navigation but to the control of a wide range of autonomous (intelligent) behaviour based systems. Based on the phenomena of bifurcation and non-continuity of a behaviour or a group of behaviours that consist an autonomous behaviour based system, the new behaviours' space mapping theory enables direct mapping of the system's existing space to a graph. The latter mapping creates a world model that is made exclusively in terms of behaviours. We believe that an intelligent system require a world model to plan and to predict the result of its actions. We also believe that behaviours' based systems cope more successfully with the dynamics and changes of the real world. Combining the two poses a real problem in the creation of ...

Volition, like intelligence, is a concept of interest and utility to both philosophers and researchers in artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, it is often poorly defined, potentially difficult to assess in biological and artificial systems, and its usage recalls the ancient, futile debate of free will vs. determinism. This paper proposes to define volition, and to suggest a functionally-defined, physically-grounded ordinal scale and a procedure by which volition might be measured: a kind of Turing test for volition, but motivated by an explicit analysis of the concept being tested and providing results which are graded, rather than Boolean, so that candidate systems may be ranked according to their degree of volitional endowment. Volition is proposed to be a functional, aggregate property of certain physical systems and is defined as the capacity for adaptive decision-making. A scale similar in scope to Daniel Dennett’s Kinds of Minds scale is then proposed, as well as a set of progressive “litmus tests ” for determining where a candidate system falls on the scale (see Tables 1-4). Such a scale could be useful in illuminating our understanding of volition and in assessing progress made in engineering intelligent, autonomous artificial organisms.

. Wander Around Go Along Architecture of an autonomous system: Application to mobile robot navigation 1. GOALS OF THE PROJECT 1.1 Autonomous systems for robot applications 1.2 The behavioural approach Institut d'Informatique et Intelligence Artificielle, Universit 'e de Neuchatel, Monruz 36, 2000 Neuchatel, Switzerland, Muller@info.unine.ch Institut de Microtechnique, Universit'e de Neuchatel, Tivoli 28, 2003 Neuchatel, Switzerland, Hugli@imt.unine.ch We investigate the behavioural approach for building autonomous systems like mobile robots. In this paper we begin by giving a motivation for this approach to autonomy and then describe the architecture selected for its implementation. Finally, we present the experimental mobile robot together with its main features. Jean-Pierre Muller Heinz Hugli The main goal of this project is to validate an autonomous system architecture in the context of mobile robotics. This research project is motivated by the central role autonomous intelligent s...