Monthly General Meeting
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Exploring Consciousness in Autonomous Robots
Louise and James Gunderson
and Basil the Robot
This talk will focus on the question of consciousness, as it might be applied to a computer-based entity. We will begin by presenting Basil, a first generation service robot, which uses a biologically based cybernetic brain to function is a real world environment. The brain is designed to have structures that are analogs to the neural structures in vertebrate brains, and emulates many of the behaviors of a biological organism. The latter part of the talk will look at the question of how far these emulated behaviors can be extended, and to what degree the emulation can be considered an embodiment of characteristics such as autonomy, intelligence, and consciousness
Louise and James Gunderson have been working in the areas of artificial intelligence, robotics, and cognition for many years. They are the authors numerous technical papers, conference papers, and have organized and participated in symposia on many features of autonomy and artificial intelligence for mobile robots. They recently completed a technical book “Robots, Reasoning, and Reification,” published by Springer in 2008, which addresses the question of what needs to be added to current robotic systems to enable the robots to behave in the ways that we expect/hope robots will behave. Their recent work has focuses on the mechanisms that biological entities use to survive in a complex, uncertain, and dynamic world. This research is embodied in a Cybernetic Brain – a software model derived from the neuroanatomy of vertebrate brains. By emulating these neural structures, the cybernetic brain is capable of mapping the raw sensor data into symbolic representations, and applying artificial intelligence technique to that symbolic representation. Louise has degrees in Chemistry (University of California, Berkeley), Biology (University of Colorado, Denver), a Masters in Environmental Science ( University of Colorado, Denver) and a PhD in Systems Engineering (University of Virginia) Her dissertation was focused on building computer models of human decision processes, to enable better predictions of human behavior. James has been researching artificial intelligence since the early 1980's, and received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Virginia, with a dissertation on planning and execution systems for mobile robots. Basil is a BSL series robot, manufactured by Gamma Two, Inc. The robot is an autonomous mobile robot designed for mobility assistance in household environments. Based on Cybernetic Brain technology, the robot uses a speech based input/output system, and is capable of recognizing and 'reasoning' about the objects it encounters.
For more information, contact
Ed Schreiber, Programs Officer, 303-692-8535,
ed@schreiber.org
Denver Mensa Contact phone: 303-279-1730