🚀 go-pugleaf

           Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
              (GB = Galbraith Building, 35 St. George Street)

       -------------------------------------------------------------

                                    AI
              GB221, at 11:00 a.m., Thursday 21 January 1993

                             Lynn Andrea Stein
    Artificial Intelligence Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

           " Representation and Reasoning in Reactive Systems "

Reactive architectures have proved themselves capable of sustaining robust
robotic systems.  As their capabilities have increased, designers have
begun incorporating state and using this state to modulate the primary
stimulus-response loop.  While both reactive and higher-level cognitive
architectures have been well-studied, the problem of integrating these two
functions is still poorly understood.

In this talk, I will discuss a novel architecture based on the idea that
cognition is imagined interaction: cognitive tasks are performed by
interacting with an imaginary world.  We have implemented this architecture
on Toto, a subsumption-based mobile robot capable of goal-directed
navigation based on prior experience.  Using the imagination architecture,
we have extended Toto's abilities into a qualitatively distinct domain.
Through embodied imagination, MetaToto achieves the cognition-intensive
task of reading, understanding, and acting on the knowledge contained in a
floor plan; and MetaToto does this using entirely Toto's existing
architecture, with the sole addition of the virtual sensors and actuators
required for navigation of the floor plan.  Although MetaToto is only a
simple example of imagination, we are hopeful that experiences with
MetaToto will lead to more sophisticated use of imagination and virtual
sensing, and to the development of truly embodied forms of cognition.