Quote:
Presentation of the Ergo-Robot Experiment by Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, during "Symposium on Language Acquisition and Language Evolution", Stockholm University, Royal Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden (organised by Francesco Lacerda and Bjorn Lindblom).
=== Summary
In a big egg that has just opened, a tribe of young robotic creatures evolves and explores its environment, wreathed by a large zero that symbolizes the "origin." Beyond their innate capabilities, they are outfitted with mechanisms that allow them to learn new skills and invent their own language. Endowed with artificial curiosity, they explore objects around them, as well as the effect their vocalizations produce on humans. Human, also curious to see what these creatures can do, react with their own gestures, creating a loop of interaction which progressively self-organizes into a new communication system established between man and ergo-robots.
The Ergo-Robot Experiment addresses a very important methodological and experimental need in Developmental Robotics: evaluating how algorithmic architectures for learning and development can scale up to long-term real world robot experiments (i.e. robot operating and learning continuously for several weeks or months). For this goal, which Ergo-Robots addresses [P28], and in the context of a research lab, one needs an experimental platform which is very robust, with precise and reliable motor control, easy to use and maintain, relatively cheap, and reconfigurable (in order to evaluate algorithms on robots with different morphologies, i.e. different robots).
The experiment was presented at the exhibition "Mathematics: A Beautiful Elsewhere" at Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain (scenography made in collaboration with film director David Lynch) provided in itself a large impact for scientific dissemination of our research activities towards the general public, being explained by student scientific mediators to around 70000 visitors (trained students were continuously present in the exhibition), and being reported multiple times in the general press (e.g. France 2, France Inter, France Culture, RFI, BFM TV, Slate.fr, Sciences et Avenir, New Scientist, Financial Times).
ts software and hardware development was realized by the INRIA ENSTA ParisTech Flowers team in collaboration with University of Bordeaux/Labri: J?rome B?chu, Fabien B?nureau, Haylee Fogg, Paul Fudal, Hugo Gimbert, Matthieu Lapeyre, Olivier Ly, Olivier Mangin, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Pierre Rouanet. Scenography was realized in collaboration with David Lynch and his team. Scenography was realiszed in collaboration with David Lynch and his team.
