Lectures on Embodiment and Robotics

The ShanghAI lectures provide an open forum in which leading researchers in AI stream talks on current issues in artificial intelligence.

The third lecture series, the following talks are available for your enjoyment, and are relevant to this week's theme of embodiment:

Angelo Cangelosi talks on the topic of Cognition and embodiment – Language learning in children and robots: A developmental robotics approach.  He takes a developmental approach to robotics (and psychology) and offers a remarkable example of ‘synthetic methodology’ for the study of children’s intellectual development.

Vincent Müller asks whether Robotics really needs embodiment, and he attempts to steer a careful course between the two "mistakes" illustrated in the above graphic.

Finally, Helmut Hauser speaks on "Morphological Computation and Soft Robotics".  Helmut is a postdoc in Rolf Pfeiffer's lab in Zürich. His concern is how "control" might be off-loaded ot the physical instantiation of the artificial agent.

All in all, interesting takes on the many-faceted topic of embodiment, seen from a robotics/AI point of view.