Cross-Disciplinary Reflections: Philosophical Robotics

Abstract

This chapter reports work done mostly by one member of the team -a philosopher with substantial AI programming experience, whose primary interests were in the very long term goals of the project, summarised in Chapter 1, including the goal of shedding light on problems solved by biological evolution, and who was not directly involved in the coding but who interacted closely with people who were, and with people outside the project, in several related disciplines. The majority of the work reported here is concerned with requirements, and gaps between those requirements and the current state-ofthe-art in AI/Robotics, and related disciplines. A key feature of this work is its emphasis on study of aspects of the 3-D environment we and other animals inhabit, with which a Fido-like intelligent domestic robot (described in Chapter 1) would need to interact. This is an essential part of a strategy for developing a roadmap to bridge the gaps in the long term.From the start, the CoSy project emphasised the need to study requirements, as a prerequisite for producing designs. This analysis supported the suspicions in the original proposal, namely that current state-of-the-art designs and implementations were nowhere near meeting the long term requirements. So our goal became to develop a methodology for identifying the gap more precisely, and a strategy for bridging the gap (or gaps). As an aid to these tasks, we organised several interdisciplinary events, including a tutorial at IJCAI'05, a Symposium at AISB'06 and the "Meeting of minds" workshop in Paris, in 2007. Most of this work did not fit into the formal work-plans and deliverables, but results were published in workshop and conference papers,