Curious Dogs
The Aibo is a popular robot dog designed to interact with its owner and perform simple tricks. In Sony's R&D lab, all these new Aibo dogs were given two software control mechanisms. Firstly, a "low-level learning system" that controls simple behavior and also tries to predict how those behaviors will affect the surrounding sensory. Secondly, a "meta-learning system" that analyses the accuracy of predictions made by the low-level system and controls the overall “motivation”.
Interaction between these two components is critical to the reprogrammed Aibos' uncannily inquisitive nature. The meta-learning system prompts the robot dogs to pursue behaviors that they can rapidly learn to predict, but which also have maximum learning potential. This tends to makes the robot dogs inherently curious, seeking out increasingly complicated scenarios with which to interact. However they will effectively become bored with activities that do not stimulate them to their artificial satisfaction.
In an experiment, these robotic pups are placed in a child's activity-pen and were left alone for investigation. It was observed that the robots learned progressively; initially just moving their limbs in an uncoordinated manner, followed by exploring their surroundings and biting nearby soft toys. After several hours, these dogs started kicking their toys and even trying to interact with conventional Aibo dogs. Although every subject followed a similar learning pattern, but the results showed that there were variations among the Aibos’ pattern. This research could eventually help robot designers to create machines that are much more flexible and adaptive in unpredictable circumstances.
Tng Thomson U046231A
