Cognitive Robotics

XX-YYY

Course discipline: TBD

Elective

Units: 12 (could also be run as two seven-week independent 6 unit minis, running consecutively)

Lecture/Lab/Rep hours/week: 3 hours lecture/week, 3 hours lab/week

Semester: Spring

Pre-requisites: Programming skills

Course description:

Cognitive robotics is an emerging discipline that draws on robotics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. It often exploits models based on biological cognition.

There are at least two reasons why having a cognitive ability is useful in robotics:

1. It allows the robot to work autonomously in challenging environments, adapting to changes and unforeseen situations, and anticipating outcomes when selecting the actions it will perform.
2. It facilitates interaction with people. Humans have a strong preference for interaction with other cognitive agents so being able to exhibit a capacity for cognition encourages human robot interaction. Conversely, a cognitive ability provides the robot with the ability to infer the goals and intentions of the person it is interacting with and thereby allows it to do so in safe and helpful manner.

Cognitive robots achieve their goals by perceiving their environment, paying attention to the events that matter, planning what to do, anticipating the outcome of their own actions and the actions of other agents (people and other robots), and learning from the resultant interaction. They deal with the inherent uncertainty of natural environments by continually learning, reasoning, and sharing their knowledge.

A key feature of cognitive robotics is its focus on predictive capabilities to augment and compensate for perceptual capacities. Also, by being able to view the world from someone else’s perspective, a cognitive robot can anticipate that person’s intended actions and needs.

In cognitive robotics, the robot body can be more than just an instrument for physical manipulation or locomotion: it can also be a component of the cognitive process. In the particular case of humanoid robotics, the robot’s physical morphology, kinematics, and dynamics, as well as the environment in which it is operating, can help it to achieve its key characteristic of adaptive anticipatory interaction by mirroring the actions of the person it is interacting with.

The course provides introduces the key elements of cognitive robotics, touching on all of these issues. In doing so, it emphasizes both theory and practice and makes extensive use of physical robots, both mobile and manipulator arm, as well as different sensor technologies including RGB-D cameras.

Learning objectives:

The primary goal of this course is provide students with an intensive treatment of a cross-section of the key elements of robotics, robot vision, AI, and cognitive science. Students will learn about the fundamentals of 2D and 3D visual sensing, focussing on the some essential techniques for mobile robots and robot arms. They will then learn about the kinematics and inverse kinematics of mobile robots, addressing locomotion, mapping, and path planning, as well as robot arm kinematics, manipulation, and programming. Based on these foundations, students will progress quickly to cover the topics that gives cognitive robotics its special focus, including reasoning, cognitive architectures, learning and development, memory, attention, prospection by internal simulation, and social interaction.

Outcomes:

After completing this course, students should be able to apply their knowledge of machine vision and robot kinematics to create computer programs that control mobile robots and robot arms, enabling them the robots to recognize and manipulate objects and navigate their environments. Students should be able to explain how a robot can be designed to exhibit cognitive goal-directed behaviour through the integration of computer models of visual attention, reasoning, learning, prospection, and social interaction. They should be able to create computer programs that realize limited instances of each of these models.

Content details:

(For a detailed lecture plan, see Cognitive Robotics Lecture Plan.

The course will cover the following topics:

Faculty:

David Vernon

Delivery:

Face-to-face

Recommended reading

Vernon 1991 D. Vernon, Machine Vision: Automated Visual Inspection and Robot Vision, Prentice-Hall, 1991.