Feelix Growing (FEEL, Interact, eXpress: a Global appRoach to develOpment With INterdisciplinary Grounding) is a project funded by the European Commission under contract FP6 IST-045169. It was launched in December 2006 and it is planned to end by May 2010. Project budget is 2.5 million Euro.

The members of the consortium are the University of hertfordshire, the French National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS), the Neurocybernetics Team (ETIS), the Learning Algoriths and Systems Laboratory at EPFL, University of Portsmouth, ICCS at the University of Athens, Entertainment Robotics, and Aldebaran Robotics.

The overall goal of the project is to advance the field of socially situated robots, achieving realistic robotics platforms that can be trully integrated in real everyday life environments.

• Feelix Growing Homepage: http://www.feelix-growing.org

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The SOUL project, lead by Ricardo Sanz at the UPM Autonomous Systems Laboratory [1], tries to develop a cognitive architecture for complex cognitive control.

Control systems are software-intensive applications that are getting extremely complex not only in the field of distributed large-scale process control (e.g. energy management systems) but also in the context of deeply embedded devices (e.g. in the automotive industry).

Modern trends in controller architectures for autonomous systems (robots, industrial plants, web bots, etc.) are progressively focused in explicit formulations of high-level human cognitive capabilities.

Among them we consider essential the capability of assigning meaning to perceptual flows that the autonomous agent obtains from its interaction with a surrounding physical world and the capability for introspection.

In this project the research team try to

- investigate the nature and generation mechanisms of meaning in cognitive autonomous systems and also

- to apply the emerging concepts in several research platforms with very different cognitive requirements and contexts: heterogeneity, scalability and visual awareness.

In this context, the project tries to build a formal theory of meaning to be applied in the definition of control mechanisms based on explicit representations of meaning. These mechanisms will be used in the design self-aware control architectures for autonomous systems and will be implemented in the form of reusable software modules using standardized software deployment platforms.

Finally, as real testbeds, the conceptual framework, the architecture and the reusable modules will be used in three application domains: autonomous robots, complex industrial plants and inmersive games.

 [1] http://Aslab.org

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SENSOPAC is a European project supported within the Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP6). The SENSOPAC project will combine machine learning techniques and modelling of biological systems to develop a machine capable of abstracting cognitive notions from sensorimotor relationships during interactions with its environment, and of generalising this knowledge to novel situations [1].

 Through active sensing and exploratory actions the machine will discover the sensorimotor relationships and consequently learn the intrinsic structure of its interactions with the world and unravel predictive and causal relationships. Together with action policy formulation and decision making, this will underlie the machine’s abilities to create abstractions, to suggest and test hypotheses, and develop self-awareness.

The project will demonstrate how a naïve system can bootstrap its cognitive development by constructing generalization and discovering abstractions with which it can conceptualize its environment and its own self. The continuous developmental approach will combine self-supervised and reinforcement learning with motivational drives to form a truly autonomous artificial system.

Throughout the project, continuous interactions between experimentalists, theoreticians, engineers and roboticists will take place in order to coordinate the most rigorous development and testing of a complete artificial cognitive system.

[1] http://www.sensopac.org/ 

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Lucy the Robot 

The aim of this research is to try and establish a single neural architecture that is capable of doing all the things the brain's cerebral cortex can do - hearing, seeing, thinking, feeling and moving. This ambitious project is currently closed down due to the lack of funds.

The project is related to machine consciousness as one of the main interest of the researchers are mental imagery and imagination: "how is it that the neurons in our brains can build virtual worlds inside our head, and how do these enable us to act intelligently?" 

• Cyberlife Research Limited.

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Rodney Cotterill's CyberChild

As far as I know there is no official website of this project. CyberChild project is based on a simulation of the brain and body of a very young infant. The main objective of the project is findind the neural correlated of consciousness through computer simulation. The architecture of the simulated Child's brain is a simplified neural system.

For more information see:

CyberChild A Simulation Test-Bed for Consciousness Studies.
pp. 31-45(15)
Author: Cotterill R.
Journal of Consciousness Studies. Volume 10, Numbers 4-5, 2003.

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