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Robots Test "Embodied Intelligence"
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Oct 30, 2006 05:05 PM
from the quagmire-needs-to-respond-oh-right dept.
from the quagmire-needs-to-respond-oh-right dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Here's an interesting article about a robotics experiments designed to test the benefits of coupling visual information to physical movement. This approach, known as embodied cognition, supposes that biological intelligence emerges through interactions between organisms and their environment. Olaf Sporns from Indiana University and Max Lungarella from Tokyo University believe strengthening this connection in robots could make them smarter and more intuitive."
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Scientists Try To Make Robots More Human 88 comments
mikesd81 writes "The Associated Press has an article about a robot named George that plays hide-and-seek. Impressively, the robot can actually also find a place to hide, and then hunt for its human playmate. Scientists are calling this 'a new level of human interaction'. The machine must take cues from people and behave accordingly. Researchers aim to imply humanity in robotics by creating technology that can connect with humans in a more 'thoughtful' way. The places to first see this technology are in the most human-oriented fields — those that require special care in dealing with the elderly, young and disabled." From the article: "'Robots in the human environment, to me that's the final frontier,' said Cynthia Breazeal, robotic life group director at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 'The human environment is as complex as it gets; it pushes the envelope.' Robotics is moving from software and gears operating remotely - Mars, the bottom of the ocean or assembly lines - to finally working with, beside and even on people. 'Robots have to understand people as people,' Breazeal said. 'Right now, the average robot understands people like a chair: It's something to go around.'"
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Here's some videos of Embodied Intelligence (Score:5, Informative)
Back when I was in University, I did my master's thesis [erachampion.com] on Embodied Intelligence. I developed a virtual world that adhered to the laws of physics using the ODE physics engine, and within this artificial physical environment I evolved embodied agents. It's quite interesting to watch the videos and see the fluid, almost life-like motions of the evolved behaviors.
I never got around to actually downloading the evolved neural networks into robots, although all my source code is GPL'ed and posted at the above site. So if somebody wanted to evolve their own creatures and download the evolved intelligence into an actual physical robot, it would be interesting to see the results
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Embodied Intellgence- is this even close to "proprioception" in humans?
(ie: I "know" where I am in physical space- I can also close my eyes, extend my arm out to my side, and "know" where my hand is -related to my body, and in that same physical space)
I know my question only addresses a part of the equation- if any!
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Transfer doesn't tend to work that well, except as a starting point for further learning carried out on the physical robot. This is because simulation is never really that accurate, due both to numerical limitations, and the vast number of parameters that won't have the correct values with the idealized simulation models. This is the same reason that playin
Obligatory (Score:3, Funny)
Good to hear (Score:2)
I've come to think that it's rather stupid that we think of "intelligence" and "awareness" as mystical disembodied things. I mean to include some scientists and philosophers in this group-- pretty much anyone who talks about "the mind" as a separable entity from "the body".
It seems to me that our intelligences are built around an organism with innate desires and certain abilities to affect the world around them towards achieving those desires. I don't believe that any attempt at artificial intelligence w
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I've always thought intelligence was more about experience/knowledge and pattern matching, rather than some entity.
It always gets to me to hear employers talk about "bright graduates" and "not so bright graduates", when it is simply more a matter of work experience.
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Yeah, but I guess what I'm getting at is that gaining experience and learning to match patterns requires a certain kind of activity. On a very basic level, our intelligence is not a removed entity "in our heads", so to speak. You learn by trial and error, effecting changes in the world around you, getting feedback in the form of punishment/reward and pain/pleasure.
This often seems overlooked by what I read about AI researchers. I hear about researchers who want robots to paint or understand language or
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I'd go one step further than that. They don't want it based on human intelligence, because human intelligence is just so atrocious. The reason why old sci-fi always petrayed robots as being unemotional purely rational beings is because that's what scientists see as virtue.
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Similarly the idea of simulating human intelligence is largely ignored by many people in the field.
Well I guess it depends on what people are talking about when they talk about "artificial intelligence". It's my understanding that "in the field", they usually just mean a something that sorts through data in interesting "intelligent" ways. However, if you're talking about what the layman thinks of when you say "artificial intelligence", i.e. making self-aware machines who have something similar to "mind"
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This is essentially one of the key issues that embodied cognition tries to grapple with. Conventional AI [wikipedia.org] researchers often try to analyze the problem domain and hand the highest common-level representation they can to the agent (e.g., have an analysis layer that detects things like "square" or "circle" from some vision sensor, such that the actual AI agent gets its input on the level of those shape
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If we don't, then we have to apply the laws of physics. This means that we have to take the view that everything that happens is governed by the laws of physics and random chance. Unless we can alter the laws of physics or control random chance (impossible by definition), then we have to take a long hard look at this thing we call "free will".
To put it another way, imagine that our unde
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Why are you asking me, it's not like I am the one making the decision, Right???
I smell a logic error somewhere...
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And besides - the physics occurring in the brain could be quantum supercomputing for all we know, which could plausibly be non-deterministic.
I like your theory, but I've heard it a few too many times and prefer to
When robots see red (Score:2)
Supposes? (Score:2)
Umm.. duh? Haven't we known this for a while now? It's even better when your environment can react back (ie: parents playing with their babies)
I Can't Wait for my Very Own Bending Unit! (Score:2)
Intelligence by Degrees (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no reason artificial intelligence can't be intelligent the same way as is biological intelligence. In fact, as people have guessed for a long time, AI has less limits on the degrees of intelligence, as well as on the changes to the environment it can make to sense the feedback.
The flow of sensed info to the model is a limit on the intelligence, but good models can compensate. Likewise, the flow of change back to the environment.
The ability to tell how intelligent is the intelligence in question depends on the feedback from the intelligence to the environment, where it can be sensed by other intelligences.
Again, this is just as true of AI as it is of natural intelligence.
"Embodied intelligence" is redundant - all the AI is embodied, even if just in networked processors and storage. But to date, its bodies have effected little change on the environment. And practically none of those changes are fed back to sensors feeding the AI. Closing that loop is the most important step in creating actual intelligence that we can recognize. After that, it's just a question of degree.
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To engineers, philosophy often looks like a useless pursuit, without rigor,
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Pro philosophers don't mix well with engineers because philosophers are jealous of the money, job security
Talk about stating the bleeding obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
Ok, second year mechatronics project there.
To measure the relationship between movement and vision the researchers recorded information fr
babybot (Score:3, Interesting)