An introduction to neurorobotics that presents approaches and design principles for developing intelligent autonomous systems grounded in biology and neuroscience. Neurorobotics is an interdisciplinary field that draws on artificial intelligence, cognitive sciences, computer science, engineering, psychology, neuroscience, and robotics. Because the brain is closely coupled to the body and situated in the environment, neurorobots—autonomous systems modeled after some aspect of the brain—offer a powerful tool for studying neural function and may also be a means for developing autonomous systems with intelligence that rivals that of biological organisms. This textbook introduces approaches and design principles for developing intelligent autonomous systems grounded in biology and neuroscience. It is written for anyone interested in learning about this topic and can be used in cognitive robotics courses for students in psychology, cognitive science, and computer science. Neurorobotics covers the background and foundations of the field, with information on early neurorobots, relevant principles of neuroscience, learning rules and mechanisms, and reinforcement learning and prediction; neurorobot design principles grounded in neuroscience and principles of neuroscience research; and examples of neurorobots for navigation, developmental robotics, and social robots, presented with the cognitive science and neuroscience background that inspired them. A supplementary website offers videos, robot simulations, and links to software repositories with neurorobot examples.

This book is a call to expand and diversify our approach to the study of the human mind in relation to the Theory of Mind. It proposes that it is necessary to combine cross-disciplinary methods to arrive at a more complete understanding of how our minds work. Seeking to expand the discussion surrounding the Theory of Mind beyond the field of psychology, and its focus on our capacity to ascribe mental states to other people, this volume collects evidence and research to point to a more holistic understanding of our own minds, the minds of others, behavior, language, and reasoning. This book therefore illuminates the conceptual intricacy underlying the Theory of Mind. It posits that a wide scope is necessary to make a breakthrough in scientific research towards a full understanding of the nature, function, and development of our capacity to converge on biological processes of the brain towards consciousness, emotion, awareness, and cognition. The volume presents methods, results, critiques, and models intended to provoke debates in various academic disciplines. It is of interest to scholars working in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence.

Applying mechanisms and principles of human intelligence and converging the brain and artificial intelligence (AI) is currently a research trend. The applications of AI in brain simulation are countless. Brain-inspired intelligent systems will improve next-generation information processing by applying theories, techniques, and applications inspired by the information processing principles from the brain. Exploring Future Opportunities of Brain-Inspired Artificial Intelligence focuses on the convergence of AI with brain-inspired intelligence. It presents research on brain-inspired cognitive machines with vision, audition, language processing, and thinking capabilities. Covering topics such as data analysis tools, knowledge representation, and super-resolution, this premier reference source is an essential resource for engineers, developers, computer scientists, students and educators of higher education, librarians, researchers, and academicians.

How do 'minds' work? In 'Exploring Robotic Minds', Jun Tani answers this fundamental question by reviewing his own pioneering neurorobotics research project.

Models of adaptation and neural plasticity are often demonstrated in robotic scenarios with heavily pre-processed and regulated information streams to provide learning algorithms with appropriate, well timed, and meaningful data to match the assumptions of learning rules. On the contrary, natural scenarios are often rich of raw, asynchronous, overlapping and uncertain inputs and outputs whose relationships and meaning are progressively acquired, disambiguated, and used for further learning. Therefore, recent research efforts focus on neural embodied systems that rely less on well timed and pre-processed inputs, but rather extract autonomously relationships and features in time and space. In particular, realistic and more complete models of plasticity must account for delayed rewards, noisy and ambiguous data, emerging and novel input features during online learning. Such approaches model the progressive acquisition of knowledge into neural systems through experience in environments that may be affected by ambiguities, uncertain signals, delays, or novel features.

In Exploring Robotic Minds: Actions, Symbols, and Consciousness as Self-Organizing Dynamic Phenomena, Jun Tani sets out to answer an essential and tantalizing question: How do our minds work? By providing an overview of his "synthetic neurorobotics" project, Tani reveals how symbols and concepts that represent the world can emerge in a neurodynamic structure--iterative interactions between the top-down subjective view, which proactively acts on the world, and the bottom-up recognition of the resultant perceptual reality. He argues that nontrivial problems of consciousness and free will could be addressed through structural understanding of such iterative, conflicting interactions between the top-down and the bottom-up pathways. A wide range of readers will enjoy this wonderful journey of the mind and will follow the author on interdisciplinary discussions that span neuroscience, dynamical systems theories, robotics, and phenomenology. The book also includes many figures, as well as a link to videos of Tani's exciting robotic experiments.