The RobotCub Approach to the Development of Cognition
Giorgio Metta, David S. G. Vernon, Giulio Sandini · CogPrints (University of Southampton) · 2005
This abstract elaborates on the workplan of an initiative in embodied cognition funded by the European Commission called RobotCub. We report on a multidisciplinary plan of empirical research which includes brain and robotic sciences. Two different stances dominate the study of cognition [1]: the cognitivist and the emergent. Greatly simplifying, the cognitivist approach is forged around the physical symbol hypothesis of Newell and Simon [2] and the emergent approaches are based, to various extents, on principles of self‐organization and development [3‐4]. The RobotCub approach to the study of cognition falls within the latter category. Our previous work [5] developed this argument in greater detail. Cognitivist systems, because they are based on the assumption that cognition is simply the manipulation of symbols, need not be embodied: although they can benefit from the tuning of the symbolic engine by real‐world learning. For emergent systems however, embodiment is fundamentally tied to the approach itself: emergence is obtained through the interaction with the environment, the shape of the body, and by means of sensorimotor coordination. For this reason the first aim of RobotCub is to build a fully‐fledged humanoid robotic platform shaped as a three and half‐year‐old child. The robot has 53 degrees of freedom. It has