This conference will take place on November 13th, at 12:00h, in the Sala de Audiosivuales de la Biblioteca

SERVICE ROBOTICS: COMING OF AGE?

To take robots out of the factories in everyday life is not a free lunch.Have we the science or even the concept framework to deal with open ended unstructered environments?How the new paradigms in AI, from swarm intelligence to morphological computation and complex adaptive systems theory applications, (could) help robotics? Is robotics the science of embodied cognition?Is there a need to extend computation theory to manage the interaction with the physical world?Does robotics needs a 'paradigm change' from top-down symbolic processing to emerging self-organized cognitive behaviors of complez adaptive dynamical systems?Which relations are there between new AI, the US NSF idea of CyberPhysical Systems Science, and the concepts of embodied and situated cognition popular in European cognitive sciences community and a significant part of the robotics community?What does it mean in this context to be 'biomimetic'? On the other end we are facing several methodological issues,there
is a growing awareness that replication of reported results and their comparison by means of benchmarks are needed to foster a quicker cumulative advancement of our knowledge of intelligent physical agents and even to correctly appreciate disruptive innovation in robotics research. Should we take inspiration from biology and medicine? Are replication and benchmarking really possible in robotics? Are current limits in reporting a bottleneck to industrial exploitation? Is there an impact on robotics research funding policy evaluation? Luckyly your kitchen is not really so 'open ended' and for sure not really 'unstructured'. Moreover for many applications you won't need full 'autonomy' and advanced cognitive capabilities. And factories and public buildings are 'structured' or 'semi structured' environments, too. While we cope with fundamental theoretical issues many useful applications are already possible, we will probably see a first wave of robotics applications in the next
years.