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Artificial brains for robots

An international team of European researchers has implanted an
artificial cerebellum — the portion of the brain that controls motor
functions — inside a robotic system. This EU-funded project is dubbed SENSOPAC,
an acronym for ‘SENSOrimotor structuring of perception and action for
emerging cognition.’ One of the goals of this project is to design
robots able to interact with humans in a natural way. This project,
which should be completed at the end of 2009, also wants to produce
robots which would act as home-helpers for disabled people, such as
persons affected by neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease.

How a SENSOPAC robotic system will learn

You can see above how a SENSOPAC robotic system with an artificial brain will learn (Credit: SENSOPAC flyer (PDF format, 2 pages, 520 KB). The European SENSOPAC project started on January 1, 2006 and will take 4 years to be completed. The 12 organizations
participating to the project come from 9 different countries and have
provided physicists, neuroscientists and electronic engineers.

The microchips which incorporate a full neuronal system have been
designed at the University of Granada, Spain. “Implanting the man-made
cerebellum in a robot will allow it to manipulate and interact with
other objects with far greater effectiveness than previously managed.
‘Although robots are increasingly more important to our society and
have more advanced technology, they cannot yet do certain tasks like
those carried out by mammals,’ says Professor Eduardo Ros Vidal,
who is coordinating the work at the University of Granada. ‘We have
been talking about humanoids for years but we do not yet see them on
the street or use the unlimited possibilities they offer us,’ the
Professor added.”

The SENSOPAC website gives more details
about the project. “The SENSOPAC project will combine machine learning
techniques and modelling of biological systems to develop a machine
capable of abstracting cognitive notions from sensorimotor
relationships during interactions with its environment, and of
generalising this knowledge to novel situations. Through active sensing
and exploratory actions the machine will discover the sensorimotor
relationships and consequently learn the intrinsic structure of its
interactions with the world and unravel predictive and causal
relationships. Together with action policy formulation and decision
making, this will underlie the machine’s abilities to create
abstractions, to suggest and test hypotheses, and develop
self-awareness.”

This very ambitious project has been divided into 5 modules.

It will certainly be interesting to see the progress of this EU project.

Sources: CORDIS News, August 27, 2007; and various websites

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