View - ResearchGate

Play, Dreams and Imitation in Robota 169Figure 20.2. Left: The teacher guides the motions of Robota using a pair of glasses holdinga pair of IR emitter. The glasses radiation which can be picked up by the robot’s “earrings” IRreceptors. Right: Robotina, the latino version of Robota mirrors the movements of an instructorby tracking the optical flow created by the two arms moving in front of the camera located onthe left side of the robot.babble to attract attention. In response to the care-giver’s behavior the “mood”of the robot varies, becoming less hungry when fed, less tired when rocked andless sad when gently touched.Learning behavior. The robot is endowed with learning capacities providedby an artificial neural network [4], which has general properties forlearning complex time series. The algorithm runs both on the PC interfaceand on-board of the robot. When using the PC speech interface, the user canteach the robot a simple language. The robot is taught by using complete sentences(“You move your leg”, “I touch your arm”, “You are a robot”). Afterseveral teachings, the robot learns the meaning of each word by extracting theinvariant use of the same string in the sentences. It can learn verbs (‘move’,‘touch’), adjectives (‘left’, ‘right’) and nouns (‘foot’, ‘head’). In addition, therobot learns some basic syntactic rules by extracting the precedence of wordsin the sentence (e.g. the verb “move” comes always before the associated noun“legs”). Once the language is learned, the robot responds to the user, by speakingnew combinations of words for describing its motions and perceptions.The learning algorithm running on-board of the robot allows learning ofmelodies and of simple word combinations (using the keyboard) and learningof dance movement (using the imitation game) by association of movementswith melodies.3. DreamsTo conclude this chapter, I wish to share with you my dreams for Robotaand my joy in seeing some of those being now realized.