Thesis Defense: Cognitive-Developmental Learning for a Humanoid Robot: A Caregiver
Speaker: Artur Arsenio , CSAIL
Date: May 19 2004
Time: 1:30PM to 2:30PM
Location: 32-144
Contact: Artur Arsenio, arsenio@csail.mit.edu
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The goal of this work is to build a cognitive system for the humanoid robot, Cog, that exploits human caregivers as catalysts to perceive and learn about actions, objects, scenes, people, and
the robot itself. This thesis addresses a broad spectrum of machine learning problems across several categorization levels. Actions by embodied agents are used to automatically generate training data for the learning mechanisms, so that the robot develops categorization autonomously.
Taking inspiration from the human brain, a framework of algorithms and methodologies was implemented to emulate different cognitive capabilities on the humanoid robot Cog. This framework is
effectively applied to a collection of AI, computer vision, and signal processing problems. Cognitive capabilities of the humanoid robot are developmentally created, starting from infant-like abilities for detecting, segmenting, and recognizing percepts over multiple sensing modalities. Human caregivers provide a helping hand for communicating such information to the robot. This is done by actions that create meaningful events (by changing the world in which the robot is situated) thus inducing the "compliant
perception" of objects from these human-robot interactions. Self-exploration of the world extends the robot's knowledge concerning object properties.
This thesis argues for enculturating humanoid robots using infant development as a metaphor for building a humanoid robot's cognitive abilities. A human caregiver redesigns a humanoid's brain
by teaching the humanoid robot as she would teach a child, using children's learning aids such as books, drawing boards, or other cognitive artifacts. Multi-modal object properties are learned using these tools and inserted into several recognition schemes, which are then applied to developmentally
acquire new object representations. The humanoid robot therefore sees the world through the caregiver's eyes.
Building an artificial humanoid robot's brain, even at an infant's cognitive level, has been a long quest which still lies only in the realm of our imagination. Our efforts towards such a
dimly imaginable task are developed according to two alternate and
complementary views: cognitive and developmental.
Committee:
Thesis Supervisor: Rodney A. Brooks (MIT CSAIL)
Leslie Kaelbling (MIT CSAIL)
John Leonard (MIT CSAIL)
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