Special Issue on Cognition for Technical Systems

The face of computers and computer-equipped technical systems has drastically changed over the last decade and will continue to do so for some time. Illustrative examples of these developments are mobile phones. Nowadays, mobile phones are – for entertainment and other reasons – equipped with continuous sensors for self localization as well as with general purpose sensors such as cameras and microphones. They are also seamlessly connected to the world-wide web, the world’s largest information source. Phones also have substantial computational resources causing the borderline between mobile phones and computers to fade. Indeed, some of the computer and mobile phone manufacturers are now competing in the same market. A number of mobile phone applications make good use of computational resources, the web and the sensors in order to turn phones into smart assistants such as travel guides. Entertainment electronics, in particular in the games sector, is strengthening this development. It has developed powerful graphical processing units and new sensors, such as novel low-cost depth sensors, that enable computer games to observe the movements of human players to control their avatars in game environments. In other words, technical systems are being equipped with the perceptual and information processing means for real world problem-solving. The vision of generally useful technical systems implies its own big challenges. Today, it is still not technically feasible for an autonomous robot to pick and place chess pieces with the dexterity of a five-year old, while Deep Blue [3], a computer program for playing chess, successfully beats the