Sensations and Perceptions in “ Cicerobot ” a Museum Guide Robot

The paper discusses a model of phenomenology based on the distinction between sensations and perceptions and it proposes an architecture based on a comparison process between the effective and the expected sensations generated by a 3D robot/environment simulator. The phenomenal perceptions are thus generated by the simulator driven by the comparison process. The paper contributes to the consciousness research field by testing the added value of phenomenology on an effective robot architecture implemented on an operating autonomous robot RWI B21 offering guided tours at the Archaeological Museum of Agrigento, Italy.

[1]  R. Llinás,et al.  Of dreaming and wakefulness , 1991, Neuroscience.

[2]  Ronald C. Arkin,et al.  An Behavior-based Robotics , 1998 .

[3]  R. Jackendoff Consciousness and the Computational Mind , 1987 .

[4]  Rodolfo R. Llinás,et al.  Consciousness and the thalamocortical loop , 2003 .

[5]  Riccardo Manzotti,et al.  From behaviour-based robots to motivation-based robots , 2005, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[6]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  Experiences with an Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot , 1999, Artif. Intell..

[7]  Peter Gärdenfors Emulators as sources of hidden cognitive variables , 2004, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[8]  P. Gärdenfors How Homo Became Sapiens: On the Evolution of Thinking , 2003 .

[9]  B. Dunmall Axioms and Tests for the Presence of Minimal Consciousness in Agents , 2003 .

[10]  Owen Holland,et al.  The Future of Embodied Artificial Intelligence: Machine Consciousness? , 2003, Embodied Artificial Intelligence.

[11]  I. Aleksander The World in My Mind, My Mind in the World: Key Mechanisms of Consciousness in People, Animals and Machines , 2005 .

[12]  A. Noë,et al.  A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness. , 2001, The Behavioral and brain sciences.

[13]  Zoubin Ghahramani,et al.  Computational principles of movement neuroscience , 2000, Nature Neuroscience.

[14]  Richard Fikes,et al.  STRIPS: A New Approach to the Application of Theorem Proving to Problem Solving , 1971, IJCAI.

[15]  D. Wolpert,et al.  Mental state inference using visual control parameters. , 2005, Brain research. Cognitive brain research.

[16]  R Happee,et al.  The use of internal representation in fast gold-directed movements: a modeling approach. , 1994, Biological cybernetics.

[17]  Lynn Andrea Stein,et al.  Imagination and situated cognition , 1991, J. Exp. Theor. Artif. Intell..

[18]  Owen Holland,et al.  Robots With Internal Models A Route to Machine Consciousness , 2003 .

[19]  Edoardo Ardizzone,et al.  Experiences with CiceRobot, a Museum Guide Cognitive Robot , 2005, AI*IA.

[20]  Rick Grush,et al.  The emulation theory of representation: Motor control, imagery, and perception , 2004, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[21]  Bartlett W. Mel Connectionist Robot Motion Planning: A Neurally-Inspired Approach to Visually-Guided Reaching , 1990 .

[22]  David W. Payton,et al.  Internalized plans: A representation for action resources , 1990, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[23]  N. Block On a confusion about a function of consciousness , 1995, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[24]  N. Humphrey A History of the Mind , 1992 .