When Robots Learn Social Skills

Learning to communicate and adapting our behaviour to the information we receive has been fundamental to human evolution. If machines could do the same the intelligent talking robots of science fiction could become the stuff of science reality, as researchers aim to prove.

Most research into the Artificial Intelligence (AI) that underpins any form of intelligent machine-machine or machine-human interaction has centred on programming the machine with a set of predefined rules. Researchers have, in effect, attempted to build robots or devices with the communication skills of a human adult. That is a shortcut that ignores the evolution of language and the skills gained from social interaction, thereby limiting the ability of AI devices to react to stimuli to within a fixed set of parameters.

But a team of researchers led by the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology in Italy are taking a new approach to the problem, developing technology to allow machines to evolve their own language from their experiences of interacting with their environment and cooperating with other devices.

"The result is machines that evolve and develop by themselves without human intervention," explains Stefano Nolfi, the coordinator the ECAgents project, which, with financing from the European Commission's Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) initiative, has brought together researchers from disciplines as diverse as robotics, linguistics and biology.........