How to Make a Robot that Feels

This article is divided in two parts:

- A summary of Kevin O’Regan keynote talk at CogSys 2010 by Raúl Arrabales.
- An invited extended discussion about the self and the role of action in sensation by Kevin O’Regan.

How to Make a Robot that Feels

“How to make a robot that feels” was the title of the keynote talk given by Kevin O’Regan at the CogSys 2010 conference last week. During this talk O’Regan introduced the so-called hard problem of consciousness (as coined by Chalmers) and explained his sensorimotor approach to (phenomenal) consciousness [1]. This talk and related ideas are of special interest for Machine Consciousness researchers since O’Regan offers an account for sensory feel which virtually eliminates the hard problem, and therefore the explanatory gap itself. In the following I will try to summarize the key ideas that I got from both the talk and further discussions we had with O’Regan during the CogSys conference.

Using the redness of red, quite typical example in philosophy of mind, O’Regan addressed the problem of designing a robot that feels. Note that in this context the word feel is not used as in Damasio’s work, but to refer to the what-is-it-like or qualia associated to conscious contents, i.e. sensory feel.

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CRUBOTS

Conscious-Robots.com Utilities for Robot Simulation

CRUBOTS is a set of Robotics Developer Studio (MRDS) services developed as part of a research program in Machine Consciousness. Although these services were developed originally to work with the CERA-CRANIUM cognitive architecture, they can be reused in any robotics project.

As we work primarily with a Pioneer 3DX robot, most of the simulation services have been designed to be a reproduction of the real robotic mobile base.

CRUBOTS is distributed as a ZIP file containing the source code for all MRDS services. Each service code in enclosed in its own folder under packages/crubots in MRDS home directory.

See below for specific instructions and a description of the services included in CRUBOTS.

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