The field of AI is a vast field that covers a broad range of disciplines. There are numerous branches of AI that may be incorporated into robotics applications. Some of these branches are listed in Appendix A. In many cases, the best scenario will be to combine multiple branches or techniques when designing a single robot application. This is something that Raúl Arrabales Moreno is doing with the robots he is designing (see the sidebar titled Profile: Raúl Arrabales Moreno).
Profile: Raúl Arrabales Moreno
Raúl Arrabales Moreno hosts the Web site www.conscious-robots.com. The Web site is dedicated to scientific research in the area of machine consciousness and cognitive robotics. Arrabales, who is pursuing his PhD at the University Carlos III in Madrid, Spain, is also an instructor at the university. He supervises a group of graduate students who are interested in developing machine consciousness. Arrabales developed the Web site as part of his ongoing thesis work and had this to say about it:
I think we are currently living an exciting but still shy resurgence of the so-called Strong AI driven by the recent interest in the scientific study of consciousness. Over the last decade, significant advances and contributions from psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy have led part of the AI community to reconsider the possibility of engineering machine consciousness. The aim of the www.Conscious-Robots.com site is to contribute to the spread of the incipient field of machine consciousness and its potential application to robotics. I believe the scientific and engineering community involved in the design of the next generation of robots can greatly benefit from the sort of information and resources that are provided on the Web site. The site is also useful for students and researchers working in the field of robotics and using Robotics Studio.
Arrabales has dedicated an entire portion of his Web site to MSRS (see www.conscious-robots.com/en/robotics-studio/index.php). It is here that Arrabales posts services he has developed with MSRS as part of his ongoing thesis research. He primarily works with the Mobile Robots Pioneer 3DX base. The project he is currently working on is named Conscious and Emotional Reasoning Architecture (CERA). The goal for this project is to develop and test various AI algorithms that result in automatic complex behavior generation. When asked what new feature he would like to see added to MSRS, Arrabales responded with the following:
From my point of view, one of the major advantages of using MSRS is the capability of easily managing concurrency and asynchronous input/output. However, a high-quality robotics application design requires that the correct coding patterns are used. I would love to see a tool for automatically generating widely used service coordination patterns. Maybe these patterns could come in the form of Visual Studio templates or a code generator like the one embedded in the Visual Programming Language. Using this feature, the user would select, for instance, to create a code template for writing a generic contract or to generate the required and optimal code for communicating with a GUI window object.
Arrabales believes that the real challenge for robotics is in the field of autonomous mobile robotics. He foresees continued development in the field over the next 5 years but no significant advancements for at least 20 years. At that time, he hopes to see "a new generation of cognitive architectures that will be applied to robots, allowing them to learn new complex skills through interaction with other robots and humans."
Arrabales, who works primarily with MSRS and the Pioneer 3DX robot, thinks that "no single AI technique is good enough for the extremely complex needs of autonomous robot applications." He can envision scenarios where a genetic algorithm might be useful for generating new behaviors but then a neural network more appropriate for recognizing new faces. Arrabales does believe that the area of cognitive robotics offers the most promise.