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.