Endowing Artificial Systems with Anticipatory Capabilities: Success Cases

We survey fourteen case studies which were developed during the EU project MindRACES (From Reactive to Anticipatory Cognitive Embodied Systems; FP6-511931), a project aiming at investigating different anticipatory cognitive mechanisms and architectures in order to build anticipatory cognitive systems. In these studies, simulated or real robots were tested in different environmental tasks, which required advanced sensorimotor and cognitive abilities. These abilities included the initiation and control of goal-directed actions, the orientation of attention, finding and reaching goal locations, and performing mental experiments for action selection. All these studies have shown advantages of anticipatory mechanisms compared to reactive mechanisms in terms of increased robot autonomy and adaptivity. In some cases, anticipations even caused the development of new cognitive abilities, which were simply impossible without anticipatory mechanisms.