Humanoids that Learn Socio-Communicative Skills by Observation

This is a project funded by the European Commission Framework Program 7 in the Cognitive systems, Interaction and Robotics domain.

The objective of the HUMANOBS project is to develop a new cognitive architectural principles to allow intelligent agents to learn socio-communicative skills by observing and imitating people.

We have three main objectives, all of which derive directly from the above. They are to build an auto-reconfiguring architecture, behavior observation mechanisms and behavior generation and coordination mechanisms:

• Auto-Reconfiguring Architecture - The ability to learn complex new skills on top of old ones brings new requirements on the underlying architecture: it must be able to reorganize its internal agency while displaying robustness and resilience, and this constitutes our first scientific objective
• Observation Mechanisms - To build a system that can auto-generate specifications for skills and behaviors based on their observation.
• Behavior Generation and Coordination Mechanisms - To build behavior generation and coordination mechanisms for the reproduction and reuse of observed skills.

The HUMANOBS Consortium is formed by the following 6 partners:

• Reykjavik University – Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents
• Communicative Machines Limited
• Scuola Universitaria Professionale Della Svizzera Italiana – Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull’Intelligenza Artificiale
• Università degli Studi di Palermo - Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica
• National Research Council - Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies
• Universidad Politécnica de Madrid -Autonomous Systems Laboratory

You will find more information at the upcoming HUMANOBS Project Website.