Summary of the workshop |
The Interdisciplinary Workshop: Robotics, Biology and Psychology was
held on the 10 March 1997 at the Department of Artificial
Intelligence, University of Edinburgh. This page is aimed to give a
short summary of the workshop, to give some feedback from the
attendance and be a basis for future discussions. It also provides the
abstracts of the talks, the titles of the posters presented and a
contact list of all the participants.
The motivations and purpose of the workshop:
Artificial Intelligence Robotics research is today strongly inspired
by concepts from Biology and Psychology. Robots whose structure and/or
behaviour are biologically inspired are described as `Animats'.
As terms such as `Computational
Neuroethology' and `Synthetic Psychology' become more and more frequent
in Robotics, we thought it would be interesting to make a review of
how ideas
from Biology and Psychology are applied to Robotics and to discuss if
experiments in Robotics may give some insights on biological and
psychological models in return.
The purpose of this workshop was to bring together researchers from
Biology, Psychology and Robotics in order :
- To define the actual bounds of our understanding of intelligent
behaviour and its origin.
- To review applications inspired from Biology and Psychology
in Robotics.
- To compare the different approaches to understand or achieve
adapted behaviour.
- To define the future objectives and directions of research.
- To define if a stronger collaboration between Biology and
Psychology on one hand and Robotics on the other hand can help to
reach these objectives.
Outcomes of the workshop:
Sponsorship:
The workshop was sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Symposium Fund of
the University of Edinburgh.
Organizers:
Mobile Robots
group
of the
Department of Artificial Intelligence
at the
University of Edinburgh
(Aude
Billard
and
Auke Jan
Ijspeert)