Using Cognitive Psychology to Solve Robotics Problems: An Introduction to Cognitive Robotics

This talk will describe the ongoing development of a robotic control architecture that was inspired by computational cognitive architectures from the discipline of cognitive psychology. The robotic control architecture combines symbolic and sub-symbolic representations of knowledge into a unified control structure. The architecture is organized as a goal-driven, serially executing production system at the highest symbolic level, and as a multiple-algorithm, parallel-executing, simple collection of algorithms at the lowest sub-symbolic level. The goal is to create a system that will progress through the same cognitive developmental milestones as do human infants. Common robotics problems of localization, object recognition, and object permanence will be addressed in the talk.