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Roboverse |
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Push Singh, Bo Morgan, and Radu Raduta
In order to separate the study of architectures for common sense thinking from the need for immense common sense knowledge bases, we have built a virtual physical world in which several simulated people work together to solve problems, for example, to build a table. Each person engages in common sense reasoning within the spatial, physical, and social realms to decide what actions to take. The user can interact with these robots via a natural language speech interface to request that they adopt specific goals or take particular actions.
While this domain may seem sparse, its simplicity hides a great depth of issues. In particular, the mental realms we have discussed so far all show up in some form in this domain. Because the world is physic- ally realistic, the people must reason about the effects of gravity on objects and the forces that must be applied to move them. Because the people have synthetic vision systems, they must reason about whether objects that seem to have disappeared behind bigger ones are in fact really still there. Because there are several people, they must reason about the social challenges that arise between them, such as conflicts between their goals and possible opportunities for cooperation. To solve problems in this world requires reasoning simul- taneously about the physical, social, psychological, and several oth- er mental realms. Aaron Sloman proposed this example of a sequence of increasingly sophisticated problems in this domain:
We are developing our common sense reasoning systems by making them face a substantial library of such graded sequences of mini- scenarios that require them both to learn new skills, to improve their abilities to reflect on them, and (with practice) to become much more fluent and quick at achieving these tasks. For more discussion about this approach please visit Aaron Sloman's web page Metrics and Targets for a Grand Challenge Project Aiming to produce a child-like robot. Annotations
This webpage was at the first sight interesting and led as well to the webpages of Aaron Sloman. But a closer look showed us that we had here and at the linked websites indeed the actings of C.S. of the more than 5 years before inclusive The Proposal with reflection and epistemology, computational ontology, robotics, 3D simulation and so on. But all related persons have not seen that with OntoLinux we had already taken the concept as the basic architecture of an operating system, and that the natural language processing is not taken only for a speech interface by us, but as part of the cognitive processing and the storage system of OntoLinux, which in fact is one of the revolutionary steps, because in this way not only the virtual actors and robots have reflective cognitve and common sense capabilities, but the reflection is also between the mind of the user and the virtual entity, the software that in this case is the large Turing machine in form of an operating system, or the machine, e.g. a robot, that is powered by OntoLinux, and controlled by its user or acting autonomously.
The system is derived from the ragdoll physics, which is a physics model for games and simulations. Though we have the SDL - Simple DirectMedia Layer as a part of the OntoScope component (see also the graphic on the webpage about Underware), we use instead the Cal3D - 3D Character Animation Library, and what the game and simulation engine Delta3D as well as the 3D modeler Blender offer us. Besides this, our work inspired also some research projects in the fields of developmental biology and epistemology, as well as robotics, as said in The Proposal, which could be seen for example with the actings of the institute Japan Science and Technology Agency with its Open PINO Platform, the company Fujitsu with its robot series HOAP - Humanoid for Open Architecture Platform, and the company Sony with its robot QRIO - Quest for cuRIOsity, aka. SDR Sony Dream Robot, that showed the step from the virtual software simulation to the real hardware application, and with the QRIO project, that also involved the learning by children, as well as the Grand Challenge Project Aiming to produce a Child-like Robot by the European Union and some others. Our rework of the Open PINO Platform called Open ROBI Maxifig/ Macrofig Platform and the Sony robot QRIO called Qiro is complem- ented by some of the robotic technologies listed in the section Robotics on the webpage Links to Hardware.
As an overall system for the visual part we have the OntoScope component, as well as the Ontoverse with the OntoSpace and the OntoGlobe/OntoEarth, and all of the related software. |
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