Challenges on the Development of Robotic Intelligence

The ultimate goal of intelligent robots is to provide various and practical services that satisfy human's needs. To provide various services, it is important to develop an intelligence system, capable of being flexible and adaptable to uncertain dynamic environment in robot's working space. In other words, it is necessary to obtain automatic modeling technologies for environment perceptions such as SLAM, automatic object modeling and registration, etc, and the intelligence system that receives knowledge on the environment from the perceptions. As the first challenge in this program, we propose achieving new robotic tasks based on the automatic registration of new objects or sendees. The key elements of this proposition are the development of the flexible intelligence system that is capable of registering perception knowledge to a knowledge base and the reliable perception technologies such as vision- and audition-based recognition technologies. The practical services mean the realization of robotic services capable of providing emotional and physical assistance to humans. To achieve the emotional assistance, we try to develop a robot system that shows royalty to the owner like a pet gradually as the owner interacts with the robot. The factors that influence to the royalty could be the perception of human's emotions and expression of the robot's emotion that is proper to the human's emotion. For the physical assistance, we try to develop dependable manipulation technologies that make the assistance on meal preparation possible. The key technologies for such manipulation are the development of hand and manipulator and its control that can handle various kitchenware such as dishes, cups, etc. Additionally it is essential to develop bio-mimetic electronic skin for force sensing and dependable object recognition. This paper introduces the integration efforts and its demonstration results.