This book addresses the central role played by development in cognition. The focus is on applying our knowledge of development in natural cognitive systems, specifically human infants, to the problem of creating artificial cognitive systems in the guise of humanoid robots. The approach is founded on the three-fold premise that (a) cognition is the process by which an autonomous self-governing agent acts effectively in the world in which it is embedded, (b) the dual purpose of cognition is to increase the agent's repertoire of effective actions and its power to anticipate the need for future actions and their outcomes, and (c) development plays an essential role in the realization of these cognitive capabilities. Our goal in this book is to identify the key design principles for cognitive development. We do this by bringing together insights from four areas: enactive cognitive science, developmental psychology, neurophysiology, and computational modelling. This results in roadmap comprising a set of forty-three guidelines for the design of a cognitive architecture and its deployment in a humanoid robot. The book includes a case study based on the iCub, an open-systems humanoid robot which has been designed specifically as a common platform for research on embodied cognitive systems .

A comprehensive overview of an interdisciplinary approach to robotics that takes direct inspiration from the developmental and learning phenomena observed in children's cognitive development. Developmental robotics is a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to robotics that is directly inspired by the developmental principles and mechanisms observed in children's cognitive development. It builds on the idea that the robot, using a set of intrinsic developmental principles regulating the real-time interaction of its body, brain, and environment, can autonomously acquire an increasingly complex set of sensorimotor and mental capabilities. This volume, drawing on insights from psychology, computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, and robotics, offers the first comprehensive overview of a rapidly growing field. After providing some essential background information on robotics and developmental psychology, the book looks in detail at how developmental robotics models and experiments have attempted to realize a range of behavioral and cognitive capabilities. The examples in these chapters were chosen because of their direct correspondence with specific issues in child psychology research; each chapter begins with a concise and accessible overview of relevant empirical and theoretical findings in developmental psychology. The chapters cover intrinsic motivation and curiosity; motor development, examining both manipulation and locomotion; perceptual development, including face recognition and perception of space; social learning, emphasizing such phenomena as joint attention and cooperation; language, from phonetic babbling to syntactic processing; and abstract knowledge, including models of number learning and reasoning strategies. Boxed text offers technical and methodological details for both psychology and robotics experiments.

This book offers a comprehensive reference guide for modeling humanoid robots using intelligent and fuzzy systems. It provides readers with the necessary intelligent and fuzzy tools for controlling humanoid robots by incomplete, vague, and imprecise information or insufficient data, where classical modeling approaches cannot be applied. The respective chapters, written by prominent researchers, explain a wealth of both basic and advanced concepts including fuzzy control, metaheuristic-based control, neutrosophic control, etc. To foster reader comprehension, all chapters include relevant numerical examples or case studies. Taken together, they form an excellent reference guide for researchers, lecturers, and postgraduate students pursuing research on humanoid robots. Moreover, by extending all the main aspects of humanoid robots to its intelligent and fuzzy counterparts, the book presents a dynamic snapshot of the field that is expected to stimulate new directions, ideas, and developments.

The current state of the art in cognitive robotics, covering the challenges of building AI-powered intelligent robots inspired by natural cognitive systems. A novel approach to building AI-powered intelligent robots takes inspiration from the way natural cognitive systems—in humans, animals, and biological systems—develop intelligence by exploiting the full power of interactions between body and brain, the physical and social environment in which they live, and phylogenetic, developmental, and learning dynamics. This volume reports on the current state of the art in cognitive robotics, offering the first comprehensive coverage of building robots inspired by natural cognitive systems. Contributors first provide a systematic definition of cognitive robotics and a history of developments in the field. They describe in detail five main approaches: developmental, neuro, evolutionary, swarm, and soft robotics. They go on to consider methodologies and concepts, treating topics that include commonly used cognitive robotics platforms and robot simulators, biomimetic skin as an example of a hardware-based approach, machine-learning methods, and cognitive architecture. Finally, they cover the behavioral and cognitive capabilities of a variety of models, experiments, and applications, looking at issues that range from intrinsic motivation and perception to robot consciousness. Cognitive Robotics is aimed at an interdisciplinary audience, balancing technical details and examples for the computational reader with theoretical and experimental findings for the empirical scientist.

How to develop robots that will be more like humans and less like computers, more social than machine-like, and more playful and less programmed. Most robots are not very friendly. They vacuum the rug, mow the lawn, dispose of bombs, even perform surgery—but they aren't good conversationalists. It's difficult to make eye contact. If the future promises more human-robot collaboration in both work and play, wouldn't it be better if the robots were less mechanical and more social? In How to Grow a Robot, Mark Lee explores how robots can be more human-like, friendly, and engaging. Developments in artificial intelligence—notably Deep Learning—are widely seen as the foundation on which our robot future will be built. These advances have already brought us self-driving cars and chess match–winning algorithms. But, Lee writes, we need robots that are perceptive, animated, and responsive—more like humans and less like computers, more social than machine-like, and more playful and less programmed. The way to achieve this, he argues, is to “grow” a robot so that it learns from experience—just as infants do. After describing “what's wrong with artificial intelligence” (one key shortcoming: it's not embodied), Lee presents a different approach to building human-like robots: developmental robotics, inspired by developmental psychology and its accounts of early infant behavior. He describes his own experiments with the iCub humanoid robot and its development from newborn helplessness to ability levels equal to a nine-month-old, explaining how the iCub learns from its own experiences. AI robots are designed to know humans as objects; developmental robots will learn empathy. Developmental robots, with an internal model of “self,” will be better interactive partners with humans. That is the kind of future technology we should work toward.

The challenge of creating a real-life computational equivalent of the human mind requires that we better understand at a computational level how natural intelligent systems develop their cognitive and learning functions. In recent years, biologically inspired cognitive architectures have emerged as a powerful new approach toward gaining this kind of understanding (here “biologically inspired” is understood broadly as “brain-mind inspired”). Still, despite impressive successes and growing interest in BICA, wide gaps separate different approaches from each other and from solutions found in biology. Modern scientific societies pursue related yet separate goals, while the mission of the BICA Society consists in the integration of many efforts in addressing the above challenge. Therefore, the BICA Society shall bring together researchers from disjointed fields and communities who devote their efforts to solving the same challenge, despite that they may “speak different languages”. This will be achieved by promoting and facilitating the transdisciplinary study of cognitive architectures, and in the long-term perspective – creating one unifying widespread framework for the human-level cognitive architectures and their implementations. This book is a proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the BICA Society, which was hold in Palermo-Italy from October 31 to November 2, 2012. The book describes recent advances and new challenges around the theme of understanding how to create general-purpose humanlike artificial intelligence using inspirations from studies of the brain and the mind.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Social Robotics, ICSR 2018, held in Qingdao, China, in November 2018.The 60 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions. The theme of the 2018 conference is: Social Robotics and AI. In addition to the technical sessions, ICSR 2018 included 2 workshops:Smart Sensing Systems: Towards Safe Navigation and Social Human-Robot Interaction of Service Robots.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots, SIMPAR 2012, held in Tsukuba, Japan, in November 2012. The 33 revised full papers and presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 46 submissions. Ten papers describe design of complex behaviors of autonomous robots, 9 address software layers, 8 papers refer to related modeling and learning. The papers are organized in topical sections on mobile robots, software modeling and architecture and humanoid and biped robots.

It has become clear to researchers in robotics and adaptive behaviour that current approaches are yielding systems with limited autonomy and capacity for self-improvement. To learn autonomously and in a cumulative fashion is one of the hallmarks of intelligence, and we know that higher mammals engage in exploratory activities that are not directed to pursue goals of immediate relevance for survival and reproduction but are instead driven by intrinsic motivations such as curiosity, interest in novel stimuli or surprising events, and interest in learning new behaviours. The adaptive value of such intrinsically motivated activities lies in the fact that they allow the cumulative acquisition of knowledge and skills that can be used later to accomplish fitness-enhancing goals. Intrinsic motivations continue during adulthood, and in humans they underlie lifelong learning, artistic creativity, and scientific discovery, while they are also the basis for processes that strongly affect human well-being, such as the sense of competence, self-determination, and self-esteem. This book has two aims: to present the state of the art in research on intrinsically motivated learning, and to identify the related scientific and technological open challenges and most promising research directions. The book introduces the concept of intrinsic motivation in artificial systems, reviews the relevant literature, offers insights from the neural and behavioural sciences, and presents novel tools for research. The book is organized into six parts: the chapters in Part I give general overviews on the concept of intrinsic motivations, their function, and possible mechanisms for implementing them; Parts II, III, and IV focus on three classes of intrinsic motivation mechanisms, those based on predictors, on novelty, and on competence; Part V discusses mechanisms that are complementary to intrinsic motivations; and Part VI introduces tools and experimental frameworks for investigating intrinsic motivations. The contributing authors are among the pioneers carrying out fundamental work on this topic, drawn from related disciplines such as artificial intelligence, robotics, artificial life, evolution, machine learning, developmental psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. The book will be of value to graduate students and academic researchers in these domains, and to engineers engaged with the design of autonomous, adaptive robots. The contributing authors are among the pioneers carrying out fundamental work on this topic, drawn from related disciplines such as artificial intelligence, robotics, artificial life, evolution, machine learning, developmental psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. The book will be of value to graduate students and academic researchers in these domains, and to engineers engaged with the design of autonomous, adaptive robots.

The essential reference for human development theory, updated and reconceptualized The Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, a four-volume reference, is the field-defining work to which all others are compared. First published in 1946, and now in its Seventh Edition, the Handbook has long been considered the definitive guide to the field of developmental science. Volume 2: Cognitive Processes describes cognitive development as a relational phenomenon that can be studied only as part of a larger whole of the person and context relational system that sustains it. In this volume, specific domains of cognitive development are contextualized with respect to biological processes and sociocultural contexts. Furthermore, key themes and issues (e.g., the importance of symbolic systems and social understanding) are threaded across multiple chapters, although every each chapter is focused on a different domain within cognitive development. Thus, both within and across chapters, the complexity and interconnectivity of cognitive development are well illuminated. Learn about the inextricable intertwining of perceptual development, motor development, emotional development, and brain development Understand the complexity of cognitive development without misleading simplification, reducing cognitive development to its biological substrates, or viewing it as a passive socialization process Discover how each portion of the developmental process contributes to subsequent cognitive development Examine the multiple processes – such as categorizing, reasoning, thinking, decision making and judgment – that comprise cognition The scholarship within this volume and, as well, across the four volumes of this edition, illustrate that developmental science is in the midst of a very exciting period. There is a paradigm shift that involves increasingly greater understanding of how to describe, explain, and optimize the course of human life for diverse individuals living within diverse contexts. This Handbook is the definitive reference for educators, policy-makers, researchers, students, and practitioners in human development, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and neuroscience.