Abstract

Integration of major cognitive capabilities and behavioral capabilities is crucial for robots to perform harder, general tasks. Several requirements are raised in this paper: (1) a successful integration of such capabilities need to start with an architecture that is suited for integration, (2) the development of each individual capability must be an integral process of overall integration process, and (3) the content-level integration process must be fully automated. The developmental approach to intelligent robots is presented in this paper as a way for integrating cognitive and behavioral capabilities in an automated way. This approach is motivated by human cognitive development from infant to adult. Central in the approach is the methodology for sensor-effector-rich robots to perform general-purpose, autonomous, incremental learning directly using their sensors and effectors through interactions with the realworld environment. In other words, the objective is to fully automate the learning process, so that the robots can learn in an automatic mode that is close to the way animals (and humans) learn. A comparison between the developmental approach and other existing approaches is provided.

Citations