Robots need to get a life, says Sony scientist

By Matthew Broersma

A researcher says that the next wave of robots will be able to interact with one another, form their own languages and evolve new kinds of intelligence

Luc Steels, a professor at the University of Brussels and director of Sony's Computer Science Laboratories in Paris, wants to make robots more like living things by teaching them how to express themselves. It is a concept that has met with resistance from some quarters.

In Steels's view the breakthrough that will take robots beyond the Aibo stage will come from allowing them to interact, form their own languages and even "cultures" rather than focussing strictly on how individual machines behave. This is in contrast to those who see the path to robotic intelligence simply as a matter of constructing increasingly complex machines.

If Steels's theories gain the upper hand it would mean a new direction for the robotics field. Today development tends to focus on machines that have increasingly complex behaviours and can learn new behaviours. Steels believes the next step is for robots to learn by forming concepts they can swap with other robots, thereby develop their own "minds", just as humans do.

"We're not going to get very far with robots if we don't focus on social interactions," Steels said. He presented a recent paper on the subject: Evolving and Sharing Representations through Situated Language Games on Thursday at the Biologically Inspired Robots conference in Bristol.

Steels's most ambitious projects to date have involved thousands of software agents (bits of code) transporting themselves across the Internet to control robots in different cities across the world. The agents could be "taught" which words to associate with the objects seen by the robots and then use these words to interact with other agents. The spread of words and meanings among the agents follows similar patterns to those found in human culture.

Matthew Broersma writes for ZDNet.co.uk