Grounding Language About Actions: Mobile Robots Playing Follow Me Games

This paper presents a new experiment that has been carried out in the context of the research on the origins of language that is going on at the Free University of Brussels. Two mobile robots ground time series of motor commands into categories. The categorization is based on the theory of phase space reconstruction and learning by generation and selection. Besides the categories, the robots try to develop a lexicon. Lexicon formation occurs within the concept of language games in which agents can communicate about a topic and try to develop a coherent communication system. Again this is learned by generation and selection. The paper concludes that although the categorization works ne, the success of the lexicon formation is still unsatisfying.