INTRODUCTION

Grounding symbolic representations into perception is a key and difficult issue for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. The «  Talking Heads  » experiment (Steels & Kaplan, 1999), at Sony CSL, explores an interesting coupling between grounding and social learning of language. In the first version of this experiment, two cameras were interacting in a simplified visual environment made of colored shapes on a white board and developed a shared, grounded lexicon via interactions called "language games".

The "Talking Robot" activity will start a new experiment which is an extension of the original "Talking Heads" with two autonomous robots (Aibo ERS7) instead of two cameras and a complex and unconstrained visual environment. This setting raises several difficult problems: how to request attention from one robot to start an interaction, how to share attention on a given visual subject, how to establish a stable enough image segmentation, define a categorization strategy, how to point objects (using a laser).

The goal of this research is to reinforce the validity of the first results of the Talking Heads experiment by showing that the proposed mechanism for lexicon acquisition stands in the case of a noisy, complex environment. It will also serve as a basis ground for more complex interactions and future expriments.

PUBLICATIONS

Nottale, M.	Ancrage d'un lexique partagé entre robots autonomes dans un environnement non­contraint. 2008.
Nottale & Baillie	Talking Robots: grounding a shared lexicon in an unconstrained environment. Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Epigenetic Robotics. 2007.
Baillie & Nottale	Dynamic Evolution of Language Games between Two Autonomous Robots. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning. 2005.
Baillie & Nottale	Segmentation Stability: A Key Component for Joint Attention. Proceedings of Epigenetic Robotics. 2005.
Baillie & Nottale	Talking Robots: a Fully Autonomous Implementation of the Talking Heads. Poster in the proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 2005.
Baillie	Grouding Symbols in Perception with two Interacting Autonomous Robots. Proceedings of epigenetic robotics. 2004.

 

PARTICIPANTS

>> Jean-Christophe Baillie is the project leader.

>> Matthieu Nottale is working during his PhD on the "Talking Robots" implementation.