Sci-fi meets reality. Robotics is on the verge of a breakthrough that could lead to intelligent machines moving out of the factory and into the workplace or home. Robots have been very successful at repetitive tasks, mostly on the factory floor, but the next step is people skills, and they haven't had much of that. We are now learning of an event organized by European Science Foundation (ESF) and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), and held in Japan early this year, where young researchers active in cognitive sciences and robotics came together to push for a new generation of intelligent machines.

The problem of making robots move elegantly was a point of major discussion. Professor Florentin Worgotter from Gottingen University in Germany pointing out that Russian physiologist Nikolai Bernstein had anticipated the difficulty of mimicking animal movements in 1930, because this required a complex combination of mechanics, neuronal feedback, and instantaneous adaptability. However Worgotter suggested that with greater understanding now of how animals coordinate their movements, the same principles could soon be transferable to robots, even if it will be some time before this problem is solved completely.

Meanwhile Dr. Shuuji Kajita from Japanese research group AIST demonstrated biped robots with new walking techniques based on the Zero-Moment Point principle, which is essentially designed to ensure that any top heavy system such as a humanoid robot can walk without losing balance or imposing too great a stress on its points of contact with the ground. Such robots move considerably better than earlier machines, with scope for further improvement.

Professor Yasuo Kuniyoshi from the University of Tokyo admitted that traditional approaches based on artificial intelligence techniques developed over the past 25 years had not succeeded in making adaptable robots. Such techniques involve breaking down events that a robot has not been programmed to expect into smaller parts in an attempt to analyse them. The problem with this is that the robot has no context in which to decide how to act, and an alternative approach now being tried involves imposing constraints on the robot’s interactions, from which more intelligent behavior can emerge.

Then Dr. Ales Ude from the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia introduced the new concept of ‘object-action complex’ (OAC), which has recently been proposed to help robots learn actively through manipulation in an attempt to perform specific tasks. This can be combined with imitation and coaching, resembling more closely the way people learn new tasks.

No matter what approach is adopted to teaching robots, there has to be some form of communication with humans, and so this was another major focus of the conference. Professor Aude Billard from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Laussane reported recent progress developing natural means of transmitting human knowledge about tasks and skills to robots. Her work exploits various methods of human-machine interaction, in particular the ability to imitate. Up to now, giving robots the ability to imitate even simple gestures has proved sufficiently complex to occupy the research community for many years. But very recently, it has become clear that the way forward lies with enabling robots to interpret the user's intention and predict the user's actions. Billard’s group has progressively added complexity to its algorithms (computerised procedures) for learning by imitation, taking inspiration from various stages of learning in children. This starts from reflexive imitation of body motions and builds up to informed and selective replication of goal-directed tasks.

The future of cognitive robotics lies in combining the techniques discussed at the ESF/JSPS conference to develop true humanoid machines capable of assisting in homes, offices, and public places. For example a humanoid butler could assist disabled people at home, while humanoid porters could carry heavy bags in airports or train stations.

For more information on this work, please visit the European Science Foundation site .