The Latest
Searching for Spirit RoboChamps Competition Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 CTP April Higher Order Theories of Consciousness Feelix Growing Project MindPapers - Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness Conscious-Robots.com joins Microsoft Robotics Studio

Popular
PSYCHE-D Discussion Forum (Theoretical emphasis) I-Cybie Review A Robot in Every Home MobileRobots Pioneer 3 (P3 DX) Cognitive Robotics Machine Consciousness and Strong AI Robotic Bugs

Feelix Growing Project

Written by Raúl Arrabales Moreno

Wednesday, 05 March 2008

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

Project summary

If robots are to be truly integrated in humans’ everyday environment in order to provide services such as company, caregiving, entertainment, patient monitoring, aids in therapy, etc., they cannot be simply designed and taken off the shelf to be directly embedded into a real-life setting. Adaptation to incompletely known and changing environments and personalization to their human users and partners are necessary features to achieve successful long-term integration. This integration would require that, like children (but on a shorter time-scale), robots develop embedded in the social environment in which they will fulfil their roles. The overall goal of this project is the interdisciplinary investigation of socially situated development from an integrated or global perspective, as a key paradigm towards achieving robots that interact with humans in their everyday environments in a rich, flexible, autonomous, and user-centred way. To achieve this general goal we set the following specific objectives:

Identification of scenarios presenting key issues and typologies of problems in the investigation of global socially situated development of autonomous (biologically and robotic) agents.
Investigation of the roles of emotion, interaction, expression, and their interplays in bootstrapping and driving socially situated development, which includes implementation of robotic systems that improve existing work in each of those aspects, and their testing in the key identified scenarios.
Integration of (a) the above capabilities in at least 2 different robotic systems, and (b) feedback across the disciplines involved.
Identification of needs and key steps towards achieving standards in: (a) the design of scenarios and problem typologies, (b) evaluation metrics, (c) the design of robotic platforms and related technology that can be realistically integrated in people’s everyday life.

FEELIX GROWING takes a highly interdisciplinary approach that combines theories, methods, and technology from developmental and comparative psychology, neuroimagery, ethology, and autonomous and developmental robotics, to investigate how socially situated development can be brought to robots that grow up and adapt to humans in everyday environments. We expect to have a significant impact on the scientific community, on two grounds. On the one hand, our research focus poses an important and as-yet largely unexplored scientific question that is increasingly recognized as a keystone in the development of human-oriented social technology and in the understanding of humans, and can contribute to the advancement of entertainment, developmental, service, and rehabilitation robotics. On the other hand, our strongly interdisciplinary effort could make important contributions to a number of disciplines and set the grounds towards long-term collaborations among them.