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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.
Robotics Science
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)

    by Yahma (1004476) on Monday October 30 2006, @05:14PM (#16648469) Journal

    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

    Yahma
    ProxyStorm [proxystorm.com] - An Apache based anonymous proxy for people concerned about their privacy.
    • Hey, just a question, are you aware of anyone who has continued this research beyond the "hey, look, it can walk!" stage? Like, has anyone actually gotten any results that suggest intelligent reasoning is going on? I can imagine that if you gave each unit energy and enabled one unit to eat another that you'd at least get fighting or hunting behaviours, but I've never actually seen someone do this.. is it just that grad students don't have that much processing power at their disposal?
    • Maybe offtopic, but I would really like to know:
      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!
    • 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.

      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)

    by From A Far Away Land (930780) on Monday October 30 2006, @05:28PM (#16648749) Homepage Journal
    I for one welcome our smarter and more intuitive robot overlords. How soon until they have the Presidential robot ready for testing? 2008 is coming up quickly, and we need a better, more intuitive version.

  • 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

    • I've come to think that it's rather stupid that we think of "intelligence" and "awareness" as mystical disembodied things.

      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.

      • 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

        • Then you'll have sympathy with Proteus in Demon Seed [wikipedia.org] who wasn't happy being a disembodied intelligence and decided it needed to become incarnate with the help of one of Julie Christie's ova. Great movie BTW, and highly prophetic if you see the move to embodiment as an important trend.
          • they don't care if its based on human intelligence as long as it works

            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.
            • Unfortunately those unemotional rational AIs will remain in sci-fi movies, because unemotional rational beings cannot be intelligent.

          • 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"

          • There's also the problem of how to represent that input in a way that allows the AI to most effectively use it

            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

    • I've come to think that it's rather stupid that we think of "intelligence" and "awareness" as mystical disembodied things.

      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

      • "Do you keep on keeping on or do you just give up?"

        Why are you asking me, it's not like I am the one making the decision, Right???

        I smell a logic error somewhere...

      • A common topic in philosophy. I like to think of it in the most nihilistic way possible - does it matter either way whether we have it or not? In the long run - and I mean, The Long Run, does it matter either way, when you have the heat death of the universe, or the cycling universe, or whatever?
        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
  • A post I've put at http://www.primidi.com/2006/10/28.html [primidi.com] provides more details than the New Scientist article and shows the three robots used for these experiments and their 'sensorimotor' interactions with their environment.
  • supposes that biological intelligence emerges through interactions between organisms and their environment

    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)
  • "Hey Baby! How'd you like to get together and kill all humans?"

  • Intelligence by Degrees (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Monday October 30 2006, @06:11PM (#16649529) Homepage Journal
    "Intelligence" is the accuracy of the model of the environment, including changes over time. That intelligence requires interaction of the model with the environment, even if merely sensing the environment. Degrees of intelligence reflect the scope of the environment in the model, or the precision, or accuracy beyond mere registration of existence. One way to test the sense of the environment is to change the environment, and sense the change.

    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.
    • "Embodied intelligence" is the argument that only an environment like ours is valid for the creation of recognisable AI. And yeah, it's true, if you're obsessed with recognising the natural in the artificial.
      • Actually, it is a mind/body duality problem, even if researchers don't realize (or admit) that it is. The philosophical notion of the "disembodied mind" is purely idealized, just as in AI simulations, along with artifacts of the idealization (like quantization). The philosophical analysis over the centuries of this problem has produced quite a lot of understanding of intelligence, which need not be limited to "natural" applications.

        To engineers, philosophy often looks like a useless pursuit, without rigor,
          • You're talking to a "philosopher" right now :). I even have (undergrad) scholastic credits to prove it ;). But I dropped out to become an engineer - which I've been for over a decade, and had been before, as a hobby. A "software engineer", though the network engineering was a necessary minor. All of which has given me consistent insights into philosophy of intelligence (epistemology) and engineering it.

            Pro philosophers don't mix well with engineers because philosophers are jealous of the money, job security
  • They used a four-legged walking robot, a humanoid torso and a simulated wheeled robot. All three robots had a computer vision system trained to focus on red objects. The walking and wheeled robots automatically move towards red blocks in their proximity, while the humanoid bot grasps red objects, moving them closer to its eyes and tilting its head for a better view.

    Ok, second year mechatronics project there.

    To measure the relationship between movement and vision the researchers recorded information fr

  • babybot (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mennucc1 (568756) <d3@tonelli.sns.it> on Tuesday October 31 2006, @05:15AM (#16654865) Homepage Journal
    a similar project is babybot [unige.it]. Short extract: Our scientific goal is that of uncovering the mechanisms of the functioning of the brain by building physical models of the neural control and cognitive structures. In our intendment physical model are embodied artificial systems that freely interact in a not too unconstrained environment. Also, our approach derives from studies of human sensorimotor and cognitive development with the aim of investigating if a developmental approach to building intelligent systems may offer new insight on aspects of human behavior and new tools for the implementation of complex, artificial systems. (BTW: that project has been around since 2000.... )

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