Human-robot coexistence increasingly close

Having a personal robot in our home, fully integrated into our daily lives, is one of the developments envisaged for the 21^st century. Achieving robots capable of understanding and learning from their own actions and their own experience as they interact with other intelligent agents, whether humans or machines, i.e., that are capable of constructing a narrative ego with which to communicate with humans, is the goal of the WYSIWYD project.

WYSIWYD is a project of the European Commission’s 7^th Framework Programme, which has been coordinated for the last two years by Paul Verschure, director of the Synthetic, Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems (SPECS) research group and ICREA research professor at UPF’s Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC), with the participation of an international consortium.

A device with its own language

To realize human-robot coexistence, major obstacles have to be overcome. For these devices to be operative they must be prepared to act in unpredictable situations, operate in complex physical and social environments, learn new skills while interacting with humans, and especially be able to establish communication bridges between man and machine.

All this is no longer science fiction. Thanks to the creation of a specific robot language of communication, WYSIWYD Robotese (WR) testing a communication channel that enables the robot to interpret and communicate intentions compatible with humans. This language has been built from a biological and a psychological perspective for the robot to acquire, assimilate and express WR according to its individual experience, interactively.

With an integrated architecture, the backbone of autonomous communication

Robotics, cognitive science, psychology and computational neuroscience are working together to build this new human-machine paradigm. The researchers have to implement a well-defined experimental methodology, an integrated architecture (WR-DAC) for perception, cognition, action and intrinsic motivation, which provides the backbone of an autonomous communication structure.

All of the above represents a qualitative change in the relationship inhuman-robot interaction. Unlocking new capabilities and areas of application together with enhanced safety, robustness and monitoring, will mean that humans will be able to trust in robots because, as the project acronym states, these 21^st century robots, when they say what they do and do what they say.

Reference project and evaluation results:

What You Say Is What You Did (WYSIWYD) is a project of the 7^th Framework Programme of the European Commission (FP7-ICT-612139) coordinated by Paul Verschure, director of the Synthetic, Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems (SPECS) research group and ICREA research professor at UPF’s DTIC, which has been ongoing for the last two years in conjunction with an international consortium. On 19 March, at the INSERM (Lyon, France), the European Commission evaluated the results obtained so far by the project and it achieved the highest score, ”excellent”.