The Cognition and Affect Project

Exploring architectures for intelligent agents:
(whether natural or artificial)

The CogAff project is a broad research effort on the principles for designing and explaining architectures for whole intelligent agents. This highly multi-disciplinary project take multiple approached from different scientific fields. One of the goals is understanding consciousness.

Visit the website for a detailed overview:

• The Cognition and Affect Project Homepage.

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 The website of CRONOS PROJECT covers Owen Holland's and Tom Troscianko's EPSRC Adventure fund project to build a conscious robot (GR/S47946/01). This three year project is taking place at the University of Essex and the University of Bristol and will finish in April 2007.

The main components of this project are a hardware robot called CRONOS, a virtual copy of this robot known as SIMNOS, a visual system closely based on the human brain, the SpikeStream neural simulator, and systematic methods for identifying and describing the conscious states of the system.

• Cronos Project Homepage

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The following systems are based on Baars' GWT (Global Workspace Theory) and have been developed by University of Memphis Cognitive Computing Research Group:

IDA (Intelligent Distribution Agent) addresses the Navy's problem of job distribution using the Conscious Agent Framework. IDA is a verycomplex agent that perceives e-mails from sailors, deliberates on the right jobs for the sailor and negotiates with the sailor in the context of sailor's preferences and Navy's policies. This project is funded by ONR (Office of Naval Research) and NPRST (Naval Personnel Research, Studies, and Technology).

LIDA (Learning IDA) adds various mode of human-like learning to the IDA architecture, including perceptual, episodic, procedural and attentional learning.

LIDA-AV is applied to the realm of cognitive robotics, LIDA-AV aims to control an autonomous vehicle with the LIDA technology. (see project page).

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CERA (Conscious and Emotional Reasoning Architecture) is a software architecture that allows the integration of different cognitive components into a single autonomous system. It is designed to be a flexible research framework in which different consciousness and emotion models can be integrated and tested. The CERA native components have been already implemented following the object oriented design methodology. Original design requirements are to fulfil nine modules of reasoning consciousness and their associated functionality [1]. These foundation classes can be extended and modified in a way that the desired models are represented and interrelated. This software engineering process is called CERA instantiation, as it produces a domain specific instance of CERA.

An instantiation called K-CERA (Khepera CERA) is described in [1], where we have adapted the foundation classes for the specific domain of unknown environment exploration using the Khepera robot. CERA foundation classes are designed to integrate reasoning consciousness with the rest of possible cognitive components of a model of the mind. CERA is structured in a three-layer architecture.

CERA layered design. The core layer is where the reasoning consciousness model foundation classes are located. Then, the instantiation layer adds the domain-specific cognitive systems. Finally, the top layer encloses the agent-specific perception and motor systems.  

The inner layer, called CERA Core, encloses the reasoning consciousness model. Next layer is the instantiation layer, which contains the domain-specific cognitive components as discussed above. On top of the instantiation layer, an additional so called physical layer is required to adapt the cognitive components to the actual sensorimotor machinery of the autonomous robot.

The CERA core, which comprises the reasoning consciousness modules, defines a framework for implementing versatile cognitive processes. However, the knowledge representation is not concretely defined in this layer. An abstract knowledge class is used in CERA core in order to make the high level RCM processes definition representation-independent. This means that CERA core per se cannot be instantiated. A domain-specific instantiation layer is always required in order to build a complete cognitive model. Analogously, the physical layer is required in order to implement the actual autonomous agent control system.

[1] Arrabales Moreno, R. and Sanchis de Miguel, A. "A Machine Consciousness Approach to Autonomous Mobile Robotics". In: 5th International Cognitive Robotics Workshop. AAAI-06. Boston, MA. July 2006.
 

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