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> Permanent Address:
> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=automaton-robots-become-self-aware
> Automaton, Know Thyself: Robots Become Self-Aware
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> Droids met the challenge of perceiving their self-image and reflecting on
> their own thoughts as part an effort to develop robots that are more
> adaptable in unpredictable situations
>
> By Charles Q. Choi | Thursday, February 24, 2011 |
>
> BOTTY IMAGE: An artist's depiction of a robot reflecting on itself. Image:
> Victor Zykov, Cornell University
>
> Robots might one day trace the origin of their consciousness to recent
> experiments aimed at instilling them with the ability to reflect on their own
> thinking.
>
> Although granting machines self-awareness might seem more like the stuff of
> science fiction than science, there are solid practical reasons for doing so,
> explains roboticist Hod Lipson at Cornell University's Computational
> Synthesis Laboratory.
>
> "The greatest challenge for robots today is figuring out how to adapt to new
> situations," he says. "There are millions of robots out there, mostly in
> factories, and if everything is in the right place at the right time for
> them, they are superhuman in their precision, in their power, in their speed,
> in their ability to work repetitively 24/7 in hazardous environments—but if a
> bolt falls out of place, game over."
>
> This lack of adaptability "is the reason we don't have many robots in the
> home, which is much more unstructured than the factory," Lipson adds. "The
> key is for robots to create a model of themselves to figure out what is
> working and not working in order to adapt."
>
> So, Lipson and his colleagues developed a robot shaped like a four-legged
> starfish whose brain, or controller, developed a model of what its body was
> like. The researchers started the droid off with an idea of what motors and
> other parts it had, but not how they were arranged, and gave it a directive
> to move. By trial and error, receiving feedback from its sensors with each
> motion, the machine used repeated simulations to figure out how its body was
> put together and evolved an ungainly but effective form of movement all on
> its own. Then "we removed a leg," and over time the robot's self-image
> changed and learned how to move without it, Lipson says.
>
> Now, instead of having robots modeling their own bodies Lipson and Juan
> Zagal, now at the University of Chile in Santiago , have developed ones that
> essentially reflect on their own thoughts. They achieve such thinking about
> thinking, or metacognition, by placing two minds in one bot. One controller
> was rewarded for chasing dots of blue light moving in random circular
> patterns and avoiding red dots as if they were poison, whereas a second
> controller modeled how the first behaved and whether it was successful or not.
>
> So why might two brains be better than one? The researchers changed the rules
> so that chasing red dots and avoiding blue dots were rewarded instead. By
> reflecting on the first controller's actions, the second one could make
> changes to adapt to failures—for instance, it filtered sensory data to make
> red dots seem blue and blue dots seem red, Lipson says. In this way the robot
> could adapt after just four to 10 physical experiments instead of the
> thousands it would take using traditional evolutionary robotic techniques.
>
> "This could lead to a way to identify dangerous situations, learning from
> them without having to physically go through them—that's something that's
> been missing in robotics," says computer scientist Josh Bongard at the
> University of Vermont, a past collaborator of Lipson's who did not take part
> in this study.
>
> Beyond robots that think about what they are thinking, Lipson and his
> colleagues are also exploring if robots can model what others are thinking, a
> property that psychologists call "theory of mind". For instance, the team had
> one robot observe another wheeling about in an erratic spiraling manner
> toward a light. Over time, the observer could predict the other's movements
> well enough to know where to lay a "trap" for it on the ground. "It's
> basically mind reading," Lipson says.
>
> "Our holy grail is to give machines the same kind of self-awareness
> capabilities that humans have," Lipson says. "This research might also shed
> new light on the very difficult topic of our self-awareness from a new
> angle—how it works, why and how it developed."
>
> One potential application they have tested for self-aware machines is with a
> model bridge, with sensors continuously monitoring vibrations across its
> frame to develop a self-image of its "body". "In simulations we've shown that
> it could identify weakened joints a lot sooner than via traditional civil
> engineering methods," Lipson says. "The bridge isn't going to suddenly wake
> up one day and say hello, but in a primitive sense you can say it has
> self-image, enough to turn on a red light if something's wrong."
>
> A key question for this research concerns how far it can actually go. "These
> are very simple robots, maybe eight or a dozen moving parts, so it's
> relatively easy to construct models of everything. But if you scale it up,
> will it still be able to make a good model of self?" Bongard asks. "That
> question also extends to social robots observing a human or something else
> complex. The question of scalability is what research is examining at the
> moment."
>
> Intriguingly, the research also revealed what mental illness robots might
> develop. For instance, the starfishlike robot that developed a body image
> "spontaneously developed 'phantom limb' syndrome, thinking it had arms and
> legs where it didn't," Lipson says. "As robots become more complex and evolve
> themselves, we could see the same kinds of disorders we [humans can] have
> appear in machines."
>
> Lipson detailed his team's research February 19 at the annual meeting of the
> American Association for Advancement of Science conference in Washington, D.C.
>
> Source: Scientific American
> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=automaton-robots-become-self-aware&print=true
>
