Do cognition and robotics share common ground? Some answers from the MCS perspective and an RH-Y case study

Abstract

In the historical development of human tools and techniques, as well as of human philosophies, whereby the spiritual and material worlds tend to progressively merge, the moment has arrived where cognition seems also to have become a feature of man-made artifacts. The "MCS" - Model for Cognitive Sciences - provides a focused theory of core cognitive entities, including knowledge, expertise, learning, and intelligence. It is behavioral, is independent of implementation, and it provides a quantitative metric system. From the MCS perspective, cognition has fundamental limitations, which are inherited from properties of modeling and information. Cognition nevertheless has a potentially unique role in making both human-based and machine-based control effective. In the cognition domain, the boundaries between humans and robots depend on one's point of view: from the MCS perspective, in the core definitions and metrics, the overlap is total; when considering properties typically defined for a human context, such as consciousness, conscience, or life, a rather simple and direct analogous correspondence can also be given; now if an attempt is made to create robots that are identical to humans in all respects, this attempt can only fail, globally or in any significant part, and in particular for the cognitive subsystem. Examples taken from robots developed for Eurobot and Robocup at Home show that machine-based cognition is a common ground shared by robotics and cognition. Many instances show how the same robots prove to operate with peripheral cognitive properties classically defined for the human context, in particular, and newly here, the properties of consciousness, conscience and life. Nevertheless, many people intuitively feel that implemented robotics and human cognition can only remain totally disconnected; for any progress in this domain to become possible, it would be necessary to clarify which purpose is to be aimed at. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.