Sony researchers create 'curious' Aibos

Sony Corp. has succeeded in giving selected Aibo pet robots curiosity, researchers at Sony Computer Science Laboratory (SCSL) in Paris said last week. Their research won't lead to conscious robots soon, if ever, but it could help other fields such as child developmental psychology, they said during an open day in Tokyo.

More than 50 years ago Alan Turing, considered by many to be the father of computer science, speculated about the possibility of creating synthetic consciousness. Progress has been made with AI (artificial intelligence) systems, which have typically used task-defined learning algorithms that enable programs to define what is good or bad about particular sets of information in relation to achieving preset goals, according to SCSL researcher Frederic Kaplan.

Increases in computing power are leading to systems, for example robots, that appear to have the ability to react appropriately within a given set of parameters to ever more complex stimuli -- so that such systems may start to appear intelligent, Kaplan said.

But such approaches contain defined tasks and limitations so that while systems may become efficient in coping with sets of goals, they remain, essentially, programmed. And once the program's parameters are fulfilled, the learning stops, he said.

But what if a robot could be made inherently "curious?" And what if its curiosity was backed by awareness of the value of its learning?

Such qualities are precisely what Kaplan and his fellow SCSL researcher Pierre-Yves Oudeyer believe they have achieved with Aibo ERS-7 robot dogs in experiments over the last three years, Kaplan said.

They repeated the experiments hundreds of times with about a dozen Aibos, putting them in playpens with balls. In four or five hours, the mechanical dogs typically progressed from swivelling their legs and heads to wiggling, to being able to crawl. Then, each in their own way, they began to crawl and hit and follow the ball that had been placed in front of them, the researchers said.

Since the Aibos were not programmed to do any of these activities, such results suggest the Aibos have developed open-ended learning ability, Kaplan said.

To achieve this, the researchers equipped the Aibos with what they call an adaptive curiosity system or a "metabrain," an algorithm that is able to assess the robots' more conventional learning algorithms, they said.

In the experiments, the metabrain algorithm continually forced the learning algorithm to look for new and more challenging tasks and to give up on tasks that didn't seem to lead anywhere. The metabrains, in effect, gave the Aibos a sense of boredom as well as curiosity, helping them make choices to keep on learning, they said.

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