Robot brains

Abstract

The brain hosts complex networks of neurons that are responsible for behavior in humans and animals that we generally call intelligent. I is not easy to give an exact definition of intelligence – for the purpose of this talk it will suffice to say that we refer to intelligence as a collection of capacities for abstract thought, reasoning, planning, problem solving, the use of language, and above all the capability to learn from experience and to adapt to changing conditions. You will see that Learning and adaptation are important subjects during the more technical part of my speech. Robots do not have brains – instead, their behavior is programmed at the design stage of the robot. Although robotics has already has made a tremendous impact on several specific industries, of which the automotive industry is probably the best known example, We expect that in the near future robots will fundamentally change many other areas of our activity. I argue that robotics will become an essential technology to address pressing issues of the mankind such as the future lack of manual labor due to the aging population in developed countries or the depletion of resources in accessible locations. However, I also argue that for robotics to become widespread, future robots must be endowed with control systems that exhibit a much higher degree of intelligence than the systems currently available and in this talk I will propose some directions toward achieving this goal.