Can representation be liberated from symbolism: modeling robot actions with roboticles

摘要

Since its origins, Artificial Intelligence has been faced with the challenge to control robot operations through the so called deliberative thinking paradigm. Robot actions are governed by a reasoning process which needs robots to acquire information from the environment to update their internal world model causing the failure to generate an useful action in a finite amount of time. The framework of roboticles, appearing in this paper and borrowed from the theory of complex dynamical system, is a tool to deal with quantities like energy or effort, to symbolize the amount of sensor information a robot is fed with, later dissipated by the action of its effectors. The dynamical law works as a triggering mechanism which controls the flow of energy between sensors and effectors so that its current value can be interpreted, in some sense, as the internal world model handled by the agent. Environment changing, detected through sensor signals, results in moving the representation point of the system on the energy surface. Moreover, actions issued by robot effectors dissipate energy in a way to maintain the working point of the system in a stationary state where the energy supplied by sensor signals is balanced by the effort delivered to the effectors.