Related papers: What do we learn about development from baby robot…

It is intractable for assistive robots to have all functionalities pre-programmed prior to deployment. Rather, it is more realistic for robots to perform supplemental, on-site learning about user's needs and preferences, and particularities…

Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…

Infants acquire language with generalization from minimal experience, whereas large language models require billions of training tokens. What underlies efficient development in humans? We investigated this problem through experiments…

Designing robots capable of generating interpretable behavior is a prerequisite for achieving effective human-robot collaboration. This means that the robots need to be capable of generating behavior that aligns with human expectations and,…

Object manipulation is a basic element in everyday human lives. Robotic manipulation has progressed from maneuvering single-rigid-body objects with firm grasping to maneuvering soft objects and handling contact-rich actions. Meanwhile,…

Modern robotics is gravitating toward increasingly collaborative human robot interaction. Tools such as acceleration policies can naturally support the realization of reactive, adaptive, and compliant robots. These tools require us to model…

Development of the intelligent autonomous robot technology presupposes its anticipated beneficial effect on the individuals and societies. In the case of such disruptive emergent technology, not only questions of how to build, but also why…

A robotic swarm that is required to operate for long periods in a potentially unknown environment can use both evolution and individual learning methods in order to adapt. However, the role played by the environment in influencing the…

In this review paper we discuss the development of the minimal self in humans, the behavioural measures indicating the presence of different aspects of the minimal self, namely, body ownership and sense of agency, and also discuss robotics…

Social robots, also known as service or assistant robots, have been developed to improve the quality of human life in recent years. The design of socially capable and intelligent robots can vary, depending on the target user groups. In this…

Many of us researchers take extra measures to control for known-unknowns. However, unknown-unknowns can, at best, be negligible, but otherwise, they could produce unreliable data that might have dire consequences in real-life downstream…

This paper presents an innovative method for humanoid robots to acquire a comprehensive set of motor skills through reinforcement learning. The approach utilizes an achievement-triggered multi-path reward function rooted in developmental…

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has s fueled a shift in robot learning from automation towards general embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI). Adopting foundation models together with traditional learning methods to robot…

Imitation plays an important role in development, being one of the precursors of social cognition. Even though some children with autism imitate spontaneously and other children with autism can learn to imitate, the dynamics of imitation is…

With the rising applications of robots in unstructured real-world environments, roboticists are increasingly concerned with the problems posed by the complexity of such environments. One solution to these problems is robot autonomy. Since…

It is hard to imagine with the progress in robotics that current approaches are lacking somewhere, yet they will not be applicable to the majority of robots in the near future. We are on the verge of two new transitions that will transform…

We try to perform geometrization of psychology by representing mental states, <<ideas>>, by points of a metric space, <<mental space>>. Evolution of ideas is described by dynamical systems in metric mental space. We apply the mental space…

Robots interacting with the physical world plan with models of physics. We advocate that robots interacting with people need to plan with models of cognition. This writeup summarizes the insights we have gained in integrating computational…

Infants expect physical objects to be rigid and persist through space and time and in spite of occlusion. Developmentists frequently attribute these expectations to a "core system" for object recognition. However, it is unclear if this move…

Self-Modeling is the process by which an agent, such as an animal or machine, learns to create a predictive model of its own dynamics. Once captured, this self-model can then allow the agent to plan and evaluate various potential behaviors…