Next Step In Robot Development Is Child's Play
Teaching robots to understand enough about the real world to allow them act independently has proved to be much more difficult than first thought.
The team behind the iCub robot believes it, like children, will learn best from its own experiences.
The technologies developed on the iCub platform – such as grasping, locomotion, interaction, and even language-action association – are of great relevance to further advances in the field of industrial service robotics.
The EU-funded RobotCub project, which designed the iCub, will send one each to six European research labs. Each of the labs proposed winning projects to help train the robots to learn about their surroundings – just as a child would.
The six projects include one from Imperial College London that will explore how ‘mirror neurons’ found in the human brain can be translated into a digital application. ‘Mirror neurons’, discovered in the early 1990s, trigger memories of previous experiences when humans are trying to understand the physical actions of others. A separate team at UPF Barcelona will also work on iCub’s ‘cognitive architecture’.Complete article
Source: sciencedaily.com