A contribution to specification toward truly autonomous robots

A great deal of current research work in robotics and autonomous systems is still focused on getting an agent to learn to do some task such as recognizing an object or going to a specific place. The learning process may be supervised, unsupervised or a process of occasional reinforcement, but the whole aim in such work is to get the robot to achieve the task that was predefined by the researcher. The next logical step along the road towards truly autonomous robots that can dive in unpredictable environments is to investigate how one might design robots that are capable of `growing up' through experience. A living artifact grows up when its capabilities, abilities/knowledge, shift to a further level of complexity, i.e. the complexity rank of its internal capabilities performs a step forward. Robotics researchers increasingly agree that ideas from nature and self-organization can strongly benefit the design of autonomous robots. In this paper we studied the modalities through which pre-school children (from 4 to 5) tackle with a growing up process: the abstraction. Children of these ages are not supposed to be able to perform the abstraction process, but they have a sufficient knowledge of the natural language that allow the description of the processes they are using when they try to reach the meaning of an abstract sentence. This experiment resulted in some very interesting suggestions on what can be useful for the architecture of an adaptive and evolving robot. The importance of multi-sensor perception, motivation and emotional drives are underlined and, above all, the growing up insights shows similarities to emergent self-organized behaviors.