EMBODIMENT INFORMS COGNITION
(NSF YOUNG INVESTIGATOR AWARD)
Lynn Andrea Stein
MIT AI Lab
Cambridge, MA
CONTACT INFORMATION
Lynn Andrea Stein,
MIT AI Lab,
545 Technology Square #811,
Cambridge, MA 02139
(617) 253-2663
FAX: (617) 253-5060
las@ai.mit.edu
WWW PAGE
http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/las
PROGRAM AREA
Other (Cognitive Robotics, HCI,
and Computer Science Education)
KEYWORDS
Artificial intelligence,
cognitive robotics,
software agents,
HCI,
intelligent software systems,
knowledge representation,
computer science education.
PROJECT SUMMARY
By imagining as well as
actually exploring the world, a mobile robot radically alters its
cognitive capabilities. By agreeing as a society on the
interpretation of arbitrary signals in terms of experiences, robots
develop symbolic compositional language. These and other projects
bridge the reactive-robotic/cognitive-AI gap.
This award covers research into cognitive architectures and embodied
agents.
Professor Stein and her students have completed
the following work, under this grant:
-
Design and implementation of a navigation plan representation
for reactive robots which supports real-time natural language dialog
with a human guide.
-
Extension of earlier work on synthetic language learning, most
notably to context-dependent and compositional languages.
-
Preliminary construction of a sophisticated robotic platform to
serve as a substrate for future research.
-
Continued construction of the humanoid robot.
-
Design and implementation of an active vision system for the humanoid
robot. This system includes real-time tracking and saccades to motion as
well as learned calibration of the motor system.
-
Modeling the emergence of visual contours (including, e.g., illusory
contours) from low-level image properties such as edge detection,
optical flow, etc.
-
Continued exploration of tradeoffs in cognitive architectures for
embodied systems.
-
Completion of work on synthetic language learning using new methods
of multi-agent reinforcement.
-
Development of a software agent environment and construction system.
In the future, we intend to continue our agenda with
particular emphasis on the following:
-
We intend to continue development of integrated visual systems, to
port them to the humanoid robot and to extend them to handle its
increased degrees of freedom.
-
As more sensory and actuation modalities become available on Cog
(e.g., manipulation, touch, voice, and audition), we
will extend our work to cross-modal interaction.
-
As the level of sophistication of input/output behaviors increase, we
will begin to back-end these with more complex cognitive functionality,
exploiting our earlier work (e.g., on imagination, learning, natural
communication) as well as our philosophy of cognitive architectures.
This will of course require substantial reconceptualization as well as
reimplementation.
-
We will make SodaBot available for wider beta-testing and ultimate
release. We will continue our own work on software agents as well,
integrating them into existing efforts such as the ARPA-funded
Intelligent Room HCI project as well as potential new endeavors.
PROJECT REFERENCES
Brooks, R. A., and L. A. Stein, ``Building Brains for Bodies,''
Autonomous Robotics 1 (1), 7--25, 1994.
Coen, M. H., Letter to the Editor, AI Magazine 15 (2), 9--10,
Summer 1994.
Coen, M. H., ``SodaBot: A Software Agent Environment and
Construction System,'' student abstract in Proceedings of the
Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Seattle,
Washington, August 1994.
Coen, M. H., ``SodaBot: A Software Agent Environment
and Construction System,'' MIT AI Lab Technical Report 1493, November
1994.
Coen, M. H., ``SodaBot: A Software Agent Environment and
Construction System (Extended Abstract)'' in Proceedings CIKM '94 ---
Intelligent Information Agents Workshop, November, 1995.
Horswill, I. D., and L. A. Stein, ``Life after Planning and
Reaction,'' AAAI Fall Symposium on the Control of Intelligent
Systems, New Orleans, Louisiana, November 1994.
Stein, L. A., ``Intelligence and Reason: A Response to
Etzioni,'' Letter to the Editor, AI Magazine 15 (2), 11--12,
Summer 1994.
Yanco, Holly A., ``Robot Communication: Issues and
Implementation,'' Sc.M. Thesis, Department of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. May
1994.
Brooks, R. A., and L. A. Stein, ``Building Brains for Bodies,''
AIAA/NASA Conference on Intelligent Robots for Field, Factory,
Service, and Space, Houston, Texas, March 1994.
Torrance, M. C., ``Two Case Studies in Active Language Use,''
AAAI Spring Symposium on Active Natural Language Processing,
Stanford, CA, March 1994.
Torrance, M. C., ``Natural Communication with Mobile Robots,''
Sc.M. Thesis, January 1994.