The theory of affordances

In this paper we present a broad overview of the last 40 years of research on cognitive architectures To date, the number of existing architectures has reached several hundred, but most of the existing surveys do not reflect this growth and instead focus on a handful of well-established architectures In this survey we aim to provide a more inclusive and high-level overview of the research on cognitive architectures Our final set of 84 architectures includes 49 that are still actively developed, and borrow from a diverse set of disciplines, spanning areas from psychoanalysis to neuroscience To keep the length of this paper within reasonable limits we discuss only the core cognitive abilities, such as perception, attention mechanisms, action selection, memory, learning, reasoning and metareasoning In order to assess the breadth of practical applications of cognitive architectures we present information on over 900 practical projects implemented using the cognitive architectures in our list We use various visualization techniques to highlight the overall trends in the development of the field In addition to summarizing the current state-of-the-art in the cognitive architecture research, this survey describes a variety of methods and ideas that have been tried and their relative success in modeling human cognitive abilities, as well as which aspects of cognitive behavior need more research with respect to their mechanistic counterparts and thus can further inform how cognitive science might progress

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40 years of cognitive architectures: core cognitive abilities and practical applications

In this paper we investigate a new method of learning part-based models for visual object recognition, from training data that only provides information about class membership (and not object location or configuration). This method learns both a model of local part appearance and a model of the spatial relations between those parts. In contrast, other work using such a weakly supervised learning paradigm has not considered the problem of simultaneously learning appearance and spatial models. Some of these methods use a bag model where only part appearance is considered whereas other methods learn spatial models but only given the output of a particular feature detector. Previous techniques for learning both part appearance and spatial relations have instead used a highly supervised learning process that provides substantial information about object part location. We show that our weakly supervised technique produces better results than these previous highly supervised methods. Moreover, we investigate the degree to which both richer spatial models and richer appearance models are helpful in improving recognition performance. Our results show that while both spatial and appearance information can be useful, the effect on performance depends substantially on the particular object class and on the difficulty of the test dataset.

Weakly Supervised Learning of Part-Based Spatial Models for Visual Object Recognition

To interact and cooperate with humans in their daily-life activities, robots should exhibit human-like " intelligence ". This skill will substantially emerge from the interconnection of all the algorithms used to ensure cognitive and interaction capabilities. While new robotics technologies allow us to extend such abilities, their evaluation for social interaction is still challenging. The quality of a human-robot interaction can not be reduced to the evaluation of the employed algorithms: we should integrate the engagement information that naturally arises during interaction in response to the robot's behaviors. In this paper we want to show a practical approach to evaluate the engagement aroused during interactions between humans and social robots. We will introduce a set of metrics useful in direct, face to face scenarios, based on the behaviors analysis of the human partners. We will show how such metrics are useS. M. Anzalone · M. Chetouani Sorbonne Universites , ful to assess how the robot is perceived by humans and how this perception changes according to the behaviors shown by the social robot. We discuss experimental results obtained in two human-interaction studies, with the robots Nao and iCub respectively.

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Evaluating the Engagement with Social Robots

Theories of Developmental Psychology (2nd ed.).

This paper addresses the problem of active object learning by a humanoid child-like robot, using a developmental approach. We propose a cognitive architecture where the visual representation of the objects is built incrementally through active exploration. We present the design guidelines of the cognitive architecture, its main functionalities, and we outline the cognitive process of the robot by showing how it learns to recognize objects in a human-robot interaction scenario inspired by social parenting. The robot actively explores the objects through manipulation, driven by a combination of social guidance and intrinsic motivation. Besides the robotics and engineering achievements, our experiments replicate some observations about the coupling of vision and manipulation in infants, particularly how they focus on the most informative objects. We discuss the further benefits of our architecture, particularly how it can be improved and used to ground concepts.

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Object Learning Through Active Exploration

In this paper we address the problem of learning to recognize objects by manipulation in a developmental robotics scenario. In a life-long learning perspective, a humanoid robot should be capable of improving its knowledge of objects with active perception. Our approach stems from the cognitive development of infants, exploiting active curiosity-driven manipulation to improve perceptual learning of objects. These functionalities are implemented as perception, control and active exploration modules as part of the Cognitive Architecture of the MACSi project. In this paper we integrate these functionalities into an active perception system which learns to recognise objects through manipulation. Our work in this paper integrates a bottom-up vision system, a control system of a complex robot system and a top-down interactive exploration method, which actively chooses an exploration method to collect data and whether interacting with humans is profitable or not. Experimental results show that the humanoid robot iCub can learn to recognize 3D objects by manipulation and in interaction with teachers by choosing the adequate exploration strategy to enhance competence progress and by focusing its efforts on the most complex tasks. Thus the learner can learn interactively with humans by actively self-regulating its requests for help.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00919674/document

Learning to recognize objects through curiosity-driven manipulation with the iCub humanoid robot

In this paper we describe a cognitive architecture for humanoids interacting with objects and caregivers in a developmental robotics scenario. The architecture is foundational to the MACSi project: it is designed to support experiments to make a humanoid robot gradually enlarge its repertoire of known objects and skills combining autonomous learning, social guidance and intrinsic motivation. This complex learning process requires the capability to learn affordances first. Here, we present the general framework for achieving these goals, focusing on the elementary action, perception and interaction modules. Preliminary experiments performed on the humanoid robot iCub are also discussed.

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Perception and human interaction for developmental learning of objects and affordances

Service robots, working in evolving human environments, need the ability to continuously learn to recognize new objects. Ideally, they should act as humans do, by observing their environment and interacting with objects, without specific supervision. Taking inspiration from infant development, we propose a developmental approach that enables a robot to progressively learn objects appearances in a social environment: first, only through observation, then through active object manipulation. We focus on incremental, continuous, and unsupervised learning that does not require prior knowledge about the environment or the robot. In the first phase, we analyse the visual space and detect proto-objects as units of attention that are learned and recognized as possible physical entities. The appearance of each entity is represented as a multi-view model based on complementary visual features. In the second phase, entities are classified into three categories: parts of the body of the robot, parts of a human partner, and manipulable objects. The categorization approach is based on mutual information between the visual and proprioceptive data, and on motion behaviour of entities. The ability to categorize entities is then used during interactive object exploration to improve the previously acquired objects models. The proposed system is implemented and evaluated with an iCub and a Meka robot learning 20 objects. The system is able to recognize objects with 88.5 % success and create coherent representation models that are further improved by interactive learning.

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From passive to interactive object learning and recognition through self-identification on a humanoid robot

We present a visual system for a humanoid robot that supports an efficient online learning and recognition of various elements of the environment Taking inspiration from child's perception and following the principles of developmental robotics, our algorithm does not require image databases, predefined objects nor face/skin detectors The robot explores the visual space from interactions with people and its own experiments The object detection is based on the hypothesis of coherent motion and appearance during manipulations A hierarchical object representation is constructed from SURF points and color of superpixels that are grouped in local geometric structures and form the basis of a multiple-view object model The learning algorithm accumulates the statistics of feature occurrences and identifies objects using a maximum likelihood approach and temporal coherency The proposed visual system is implemented on the iCub robot and shows 85% average recognition rate for 10 objects after 30 minutes of interaction

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Natalia Lyubova

Papers

Object Learning Through Active Exploration

Learning to recognize objects through curiosity-driven manipulation with the iCub humanoid robot

Perception and human interaction for developmental learning of objects and affordances

From passive to interactive object learning and recognition through self-identification on a humanoid robot

Developmental approach for interactive object discovery