RobotCub

RobotCub: An Open Framework for research in Embodied Cognition describes a "research initiative in embodied cognition that will create and exploit a 54 degree-of-freedom humanoid robot." Their website gives a detailed account on the current state of the intitiative with plenty of resource material including video footage of their Open Day conference in Genoa, Italy, July 14th 2005.

Background of this research on cognitive systems is based on issues relating to various approaches from AI, symbol computation and connectionism to embodied cognition. Their approach, because of failures in cognitivist robotics is towards an embodied learning system, imitating, simulating, and emulating mammalian child development.

Sandini (2004) writes: "In most cognitivist approaches concerned with the creation of artificial cognitive systems, the symbolic representations are the product of a human designer. This is significant because it means that they can be directly accessed and understood or interpreted by humans and that semantic knowledge can be embedded directly into and extracted directly from the system. However, it has been argued that this is also the key limiting factor of cognitivist systems: these designer-dependent representations are the idealized descriptions of a human cognitive entity and, as such, they effectively bias the system (or 'blind' it70) and constrain it to an domain of discourse that is dependent on and, a consequence of, the cognitive artifacts of human activity."

He continues saying that emergent systems, embracing connectionist, dynamical, and enactive systems, take a very different view of cognition as a process of self-organization whereby the system is continually re-constituting itself in real-time to maintain its operational identity.