Reasoning about Perception, Space and Motion: a Cognitive Robotics
Perspective
David Randell
Intelligent and Interactive Systems Group
Dept Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Imperial College
London
Abstract
Endowing robots with higher-level cognitive functions that involve reasoning
about, for example, goals, actions, perception, and colloborative tasks, is
a primary goal of cognitive robotics. It is one that has seen the popular
use of logics both as representational languages, but also as the basis of
implementing programs that enable such reasoning to be automated. The focus
of our group's research has been directed toward modelling and reasoning
about space and visual perception, and implementing programs on real-world
as opposed to software simulated robots. Abductive inference using the
Event Calculus forms the overall theoretical and implementational framework
whereby hypotheses generated from interpreted sensor data is back-fitted to
explicit models, and then tested in a hypothetico-deductive framework. A
brief introduction to Cognitive Robotics and the experimental platforms used
by our group will be given. This will be followed by a discussion about
bespoke logics and research methodologies that have been investigated by our
group to tackle what may be arguably seen as one of the grand goals of AI.
For more information see
http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/research/neural/iis/research.htm#Cognitive