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  Research Activities

Research and technological development efforts in COGNIRON have a strong focus on basic research. To reach the project objectives of developing a cognitive robot companion, and in order to understand and implement the fundamental processes enabling cognition in artificial embodied artefacts, the project will adress the issues of representations, understanding, reasoning, and learning mechanisms and interaction with humans and other agents.

The scope of the project is broad as a cognitive robot companion, beyond the necessary functions for sensing, moving and acting will exhibit the cognitive capacities enabling it to focus its attention, to understand the spatial and dynamic structure of its environment, to interact with it, to exhibit a social behaviour and to communicate with other agents and with humans at the appropriate level of abstraction, according to a given context.

To achieve its objectives and cover all identified domains implied by the study and the development of such robots, the project is organised along 7 long-term Research Activities (RAs), which are as follows :

RA1 : Multi-modal dialogues (leader : UniBi)
RA2 : Detection and understanding of human activity (leader : UniKarl)
RA3 : Social Behaviour and Embodied Interaction (leader : UH)
RA4 : Skill and Task Learning (leader : EPFL)
RA5 : Spatial cognition and multi-modal situation awareness (leader : UvA)
RA6 : Intentionality and Initiative (leader : LAAS)

Overview of COGNIRON project structure

A robot is not just a collection of functions that are studied and developed independently : the interactions and the integration of these functions are essential and do provide the full context for their own development. A seven Research Activity has hence been introduced, which considers the robot as an integrated systems and provides an integration framework for the project research :

RA7 : Systems level integration and evaluation (leader : IPA)

This research activity addresses the specification, demonstration of all research issues in terms of 'Key Experiments'. Three Key Experiments are considered :

- KE1 : The Robot Home Tour (leader : UniBi)
- KE2 : The Curious Robot (leader : LAAS)
- KE3 : Learning Skills and Tasks (leader : UniKarl)

The project structure is completed with 3 transversal workpackages :

WP8 : Innovation-related activities (leader : LAAS)
WP9 : Training and Education (leader : LAAS)
WP10 : Project Management and coordination (leader : LAAS)

 

 

 

An Integrated Project funded by the European Commission's Sixth Framework Programme