Robotics
| In a lecture recently made available, iCub Facility Director Giorgio Metta describes the history and philosophy behind the iCub project, and presents some recent results of work done on the child-like robot. |
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The iCub project was started 10 years ago within the field of Human Robotics, focused mostly on building models of cognitive behaviors. The goals of the project include understanding how the human brain resolves certain problems just to use this knowledge within robotics and build models that can allow robots to solve autonomously the same problems, hence become highly intelligent systems.
In the lecture above, iCub Facility director at the Italian Institute of Technology, Giorgio Metta describes the history and philosophy behind the iCub project, and presents some recent results. Slides for the presentation can download here.
"The focus of our research is in the implementation of biologically sound models of cognition in robots of humanoid shape," states Metta.
The two main goals of the iCub project are to further understanding of brain functions and to develop robot controllers that can learn
and adapt from their mistakes.
Twenty years ago neurophysiologists discovered special types of neurons called visuomotor neurons. This discovery triggered a shift in the way robots were programmed to learn and perceive as now, mirroring the function of these neurons, the goal was not only for the robot to perceive the surroundings but also to act upon the new information acquired, to carry out a task, solve a problem, imitate what a person would do when he or she perceives and processes external information.
To translate these goals into practice, first experiments where focused on registering human grasping actions via data gloves and trackers and then these registered actions, translated into images, were used to build a classifier which would aid the robot to predict better what action to carry out when perceiving certain information.
"The message is that we started a long time ago by observing nature, ending up here, understanding the basic blocks that make up complex behavior." |
This made possible for the robot to execute more complex behaviors such as recognize not only the objects to be grasped or pushed, but also to recognize tools which may help the robot to do something with the object in question. In one of the experiments lead by Metta, this was translated into an iCub grasping a tool to bring closer an object placed too far away from the robot, in order for the iCub to grasp it.
"The message is that we started a long time ago by observing nature, ending up here, understanding the basic blocks that make up complex behavior," Metta says.
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From 2001 to 2002 he was postdoctoral associate at the MIT AI-Lab . He has been assistant Professor at the University of Genoa since 2005 and he works at the Italian Institute of Technology where the iCub Facility is to be found since 2006. He is Professor of Cognitive Robotics at the University of Plymouth (UK) since 2012.
Giorgio Metta’s research activities are in the fields of biologically motivated and humanoid robotics and, in particular, in developing humanoid robots that can adapt and learn from experience. His research efforts have stemmed from collaborations with leading European and international scientists from different disciplines like neuroscience, psychology, computer science and robotics.
Metta has authored approximately 250 publications and has been working as principal investigator and research scientist in about a dozen international as well as national funded projects.
SOURCE RoboHub, International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems
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