A Boy Scout, Toto, and a Bird : How Situated Cognition is Different from Situated Robotics

We are at an exciting turning point in the development of intelligent machines. Situated robot designers (Maes, 1990) have given the AI community concrete examples of alternative architectures for coordinating sensation and action. These examples suggest that, for some navigation behaviors at least, predefined maps of the world and control structures are unnecessary. This work has developed in parallel with and lends credence to similar criticisms of models of human reasoning (Winograd and Flores, 1986; Suchman, 1987). However, it is crucial to understand that situated robotic designs are pragmatic, emphasizing engineering convenience and new ways of building machines. Brooks, et al. (1991) are not trying to model human beings, and to a significant degree their robotic designs violate situated cognition hypotheses about the nature of human knowledge and representation construction. I will sketch out some of these distinctions here, and suggest how they might be used to discover alternative architectures for robotics.