Special Issue “Cognitive Robotics”

Abstract

Within the realm of new robotics, researchers have placed a great amount of effort into learning, understanding, and representing knowledge for task execution by robots. The goal is to develop robots that can help humans with daily tasks. Cognitive robots need to explore and understand their environment, choose a safe and human-aware course of action, and learn—not only from experience, but also through interaction. This Special Issue collects nine research papers in various fields related to Cognitive robotics. The relevance of the knowledge representation and its use by decision makers is present in the proposal by Martín et al. [1]. Specifically, the necessity of integrating behaviors and symbolic knowledge was solved by adding a graph-based working memory to a cognitive robotics architecture. The proposed framework has been successfully tested in robotics competitions such as the RoboCup and the European Robotics League. The aim of combining deliberative and reactive behaviors in a flexible way is also present in the work by González-Santamarta et al. [2]. In the MERLIN cognitive architecture, the process of integrating deliberative and behavioral-based mechanisms in robotics is normalized. The solution is empirically tested using a variation of the challenge defined in the SciRoc @ home competition. The relevance that cognitive robots can provide for improving task effectiveness and productivity in the industrial domain is highlighted in the work by Chacón et al. [3]. 8. (...)