The 50th Special seminar of School of Engineering

Abstract: Kawamura will introduce an emerging field of cognitive robotics based on his 40-plus years of R&D work at Vanderbilt University. When he started his robotic research in early 1980s, the robot community in the U.S. was dominated by industrial robots. They were equipped with one arm (called manipulator) and performed mostly preprogrammed tasks in the manufacturing floor. They were characterized as 3D robots, namely Dangerous, Dirty and Dumb. To expand the applications, he formed a Technical Committee on Service Robots within the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and began working on a new field called the service robot. Over the years, the robot became one of the three famous upper-body humanoid robots in the U.S. They named their robot ISAC (Intelligent Soft Arm Control) and initiated several HRI (Human-Robot Interaction) applications. Starting early 2000s, their intelligent robotics research was expanded to an emerging robotic field called the cognitive robotics. Unlike intelligent robots which are heavily dependent on sensor feedback and data-based decision making, cognitive robots are memory-based and uses feedback loops as emotion and affordance. This talk covers innovations they made such as a human memory-based multi-agent cognitive architecture and introduces several applications such as cognitive control and working memory-based task learning.