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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
European Initiatives
FP7 Projects
3rd HAND
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Defi:ICT-2013.2.1 Robotics, Cognitive Systems & Smart Spaces, Symbiotic Interaction
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Abstract: Robots have been essential for keeping industrial manufacturing in Europe. Most factories have large numbers of robots in a fixed setup and few programs that produce the exact same product hundreds of thousands times. The only common interaction between the robot and the human worker has become the so-called ”emergency stop button”. As a result, re-programming robots for new or personalized products has become a key bottleneck for keeping manufacturing jobs in Europe. The core requirement to date has been the production in large numbers or at a high price. Robot-based small series production requires a major breakthrough in robotics: the development of a new class of semi-autonomous robots that can decrease this cost substantially. Such robots need to be aware of the human worker, alleviating him from the monotonous repetitive tasks while keeping him in the loop where his intelligence makes a substantial difference.
In this project, we pursue this breakthrough by developing a semi-autonomous robot assistant that acts as a third hand of a human worker. It will be straightforward to instruct even by an untrained layman worker, allow for efficient knowledge transfer between tasks and enable a effective collaboration between a human worker with a robot third hand. The main contributions of this project will be the scientific principles of semi-autonomous human-robot collaboration, a new semi-autonomous robotic system that is able to: i) learn cooperative tasks from demonstration; ii) learn from instruction; and iii) transfer knowledge between tasks and environments.
ERC EXPLORERS
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Abstract: In spite of considerable and impressive work in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and pattern recognition in the past 50 years, we have no machine capable of adapting to the physical and social environment with the flexibility, robustness and versatility of a 6-months old human child. Instead of trying to simulate directly the adult’s intelligence, EXPLORERS proposes to focus on the developmental processes that give rise to intelligence in infants by re-implementing them in machines. Framed in the developmental/epigenetic robotics research agenda, and grounded in research in human developmental psychology, its main target is to build robotic machines capable of autonomously learning and re-using a variety of skills and know-how that were not specified at design time, and with initially limited knowledge of the body and of the environment in which it will operate. This implies several fundamental issues: How can a robot discover its body and its relationships with the physical and social environment? How can it learn new skills without the intervention of an engineer? What internal motivations shall guide its exploration of vast spaces of skills? Can it learn through natural social interactions with humans? How to represent the learnt skills and how can they be re-used? EXPLORERS attacks directly those questions by proposing a series of scientific and technological advances: 1) we will formalize and implement sophisticated systems of intrinsic motivation, responsible of organized spontaneous exploration in humans, for the regulation of the growth of complexity of learning situations; 2) intrinsic motivation systems will be used to drive the learning of forward/anticipative sensorimotor models in high-dimensional multimodal spaces, as well as the building of reusable behavioural macros; 3) intrinsically motivated exploration will be coupled with social guidance from non-engineer humans; 4) an information- theoretic framework will complement intrinsically motivated exploration to allow for the inference of body maps; 5) we will show how learnt basic sensorimotor skills can be re-used to learn the meaning of early concrete words, pushing forward human-robot mutual understanding. Furthermore, we will setup large scale experiments, in order to show how these advances can allow a high-dimensional multimodal robot to learn collections of skills continuously in a weeks-to-months time scale. This project not only addresses fundamental scientific questions, but also relates to important societal issues: personal home robots are bound to become part of everyday life in the 21st century, in particular as helpful social companions in an aging society. EXPLORERS’ objectives converge to the challenges implied by this vision: robots will have to be able to adapt and learn new skills in the unknown homes of users who are not engineers.