A practical approach to Humanoid Introspection

We describe an approach for a humanoid robot to understand its internal state (Infantino et al. (2013)). The method is based on self observation and communication with the ex- ternal world, according to the idea of introspection given by Sloman (2010). The robot introspection arises from infor- mation about physical components and software modules. This information is translated in a spatial representation of the hardware and software components of the robot through a SOM, which links the state representation of the robot with an high level representation given by an ontology. The ontol- ogy is furthermore linked to a linguistic module that makes it possible the interaction with human beings though a con- versational agent.