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Researches in psychology and neuroscience have identified multiple decision systems in mammals, enabling control of behavior to shift with training and familiarity of the environment from a goal-directed system to a habitual system. The former relies on the explicit estimation of future consequences of actions through planning towards a particular goal, which makes decision time longer but produces rapid adaptation to changes in the environment. The latter learns to associate values to particular stimulus-response associations, leading to quick reactive decisionmaking but slow relearning in response to environmental changes. Computational neuroscience models have formalized this as a coordination of model-based and model-free reinforcement learning. From this inspiration we hypothesize that it could enable robots to learn habits, detect when these habits are appropriate and thus avoid long and costly computations of the planning system. We illustrate this in a simple repetitive cube-pushing task on a conveyor belt, where a speed-accuracy trade-off is required. We show that the two systems have complementary advantages in these tasks, which can be combined for performance improvement.

Despite major progress in Robotics and AI, robots are still basically "zombies" repeatedly achieving actions and tasks without understanding what they are doing. Deep-Learning AI programs classify tremendous amounts of data without grasping the meaning of their inputs or outputs. We still lack a genuine theory of the underlying principles and methods that would enable robots to understand their environment, to be cognizant of what they do, to take appropriate and timely initiatives, to learn from their own experience and to show that they know that they have learned and how. The rationale of this paper is that the understanding of its environment by an agent (the agent itself and its effects on the environment included) requires its self-awareness, which actually is itself emerging as a result of this understanding and the distinction that the agent is capable to make between its own mind-body and its environment. The paper develops along five issues: agent perception and interaction with the environment; learning actions; agent interaction with other agents-specifically humans; decision-making; and the cognitive architecture integrating these capacities.

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Understanding and defining the meaning of "action" is substantial for robotics research. This becomes utterly evident when aiming at equipping autonomous robots with robust manipulation skills for action execution. Unfortunately, to this day we still lack both a clear understanding of the concept of an action and a set of established criteria that ultimately characterize an action. In this survey we thus first review existing ideas and theories on the notion and meaning of action. Subsequently we discuss the role of action in robotics and attempt to give a seminal definition of action in accordance with its use in robotics research. Given this definition we then introduce a taxonomy for categorizing action representations in robotics along various dimensions. Finally, we provide a systematic literature survey on action representations in robotics where we categorize relevant literature along our taxonomy. After discussing the current state of the art we conclude with an outlook towards promising research directions.

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As the state-of-the-art deep learning models are taking the leap to generalize and leverage automation, they are becoming useful in real-world tasks such as disassembly of devices by robotic manipulation. We address the problem of analyzing the visual scenes on industrial-grade tasks, for example, automated robotic recycling of a computer hard drive with small components and little space for manipulation. We implement a supervised learning architecture combining deep neural networks and standard pointcloud processing for detecting and recognizing hard drives parts, screws, and gaps. We evaluate the architecture on a custom hard drive dataset and reach an accuracy higher than 75% in every component used in our pipeline. Additionally, we show that the pipeline can generalize on damaged hard drives. Our approach combining several specialized modules can provide a robust description of a device usable for manipulation by a robotic system. To our knowledge, we are the pioneers to offer a complete scheme to address the entire disassembly process of the chosen device. To facilitate the pursuit of this issue of global concern, we provide a taxonomy for the target device to be used in automated disassembly scenarios and publish our collected dataset and code.