Grounded representation driven robot design

Abstract

Grounding robot perceptions is an important problem in Artificial Intelligence. In this paper we show how a new grounding framework guided the development of an improved locomotion engine [3] for the AIBO. The improvements stemmed from higher quality representations that were grounded better than those in the previous system [1]. Since the AIBO is more grounded under the new locomotion engine it makes better decisions and achieves its design goals more efficiently and effectively. Furthermore, a well grounded robot offers significant software engineering benefits since its behaviours can be developed with less effort, and even more importantly they can be debugged and tested on the fly.