Robots Living Amongst Us: to evolve
a sociable robot
invited talk at IEEE Int Conf on Cyber Technology in Automation,
Control, and Intelligent Systems, Thailand, 27-31 May, 2012
Prabhas Chongstitvatana
Department of Computer Engineering
Chulalongkorn University
Motivation
In the future the number of robots and autonomous agents will be
increased. They will serve more roles in human society.
To serve human, we need them to perceive our need and we must be
able to command robots. To live with robots, robots must be able to
adapt their behavior towards different human. To communicate
effectively robots should be able to express and perceive emotion.
A robot that can express and perceive human emotion requires extra
elements besides engineering. Human emotion has been studied in term
of arts and design. One way to have an open-end design is to do
"design by evolution." In this sense, Evolutionary Algorithm is used
to construct a robotic control system to achieve flexible goals. As
a robot situated in human world, it can learn by trial and error, or
by inventing and mixing up its stock behaviours to response to a new
situation. Perceiving human emotion can be one of stimulus in
communication between human and robots. Emotion is useful in
everyday life. For example Kaisen engineering uses customers
perception to design products.
In my talk I will outline "evolutionary robotics" and "emotional
robots." I would like to illustrate examples from my research. The
future direction is to use design by evolution coupling with emotion
perception to develop a sociable robot.
Speaker's biography
Prabhas Chongstitvatana earned B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering from
Kasetsart University, Thailand in 1980 and Ph.D. from the department
of artificial intelligence, Edinburgh University, U.K. in
1992. Presently, he is a professor in the department of
computer engineering, Chulalongkorn University. His research
includes robotics, evolutionary computation and computer
architecture. The current work involves bioinformatics and
grid computing where he is actively promote the collaboration to
create Thai national grid for scientific computing. He is the
member of Thailand Engineering Institute, Thai Academy of Science
and Technology, Thai Robotics Society, Thai Embedded System
Association and ECTI Association of Thailand.