Long Term Vision

Background

Most current work in Robotics emphasises basic-level tasks like sensory processing, path planning, manipulator design and control, reactive agents, artificial insects, etc. In contrast, research in Cognitive Robotics is concerned with the theory and the implementation of robots that reason, act and perceive in changing, incompletely known, unpredictable environments. Cognitive Robotics is concerned with integrating reasoning, perception and action within a uniform theoretical and implementation framework. Recently, cognitive robotics has attracted the interest of several research groups, and the last few years have witnessed a good deal of work on knowledge representation and reasoning.

Every day interaction with the physical world appears to be driven by qualitative abstractions rather than complete quantitative knowledge a priori. Therefore, Qualitative Reasoning holds promise for developing theories for reasoning about space: indeed, the desire to reason about space more akin to the cognitive process led to the birth of Qualitative Spatial & Spatio-Temporal Reasoning within Artificial Intelligence.

Vision Statement

Starting from a qualitative theory, my vision is to evolve knowledge representation formalisms for cognitively plausible reasoning about actions, particularly grasping and navigation making contributions to the frontiers of Artificial Intelligence in Engineering particularly bio-robotics and bio-medical robotic applications.

Action Plan

I have already done some work in this direction - in 2005 (independently as well as part of guiding an M.Tech dissertation) at Tezpur University, India and prior to that between 1999 and 2003 (as an application of the spatio-temporal theory of my PhD dissertation) at University of Leeds, England. I now have a SERC Fast Track Project on Cognitive Robotics. I foresee a couple of projects for any substantial work to be done in this area. I intend to have close links with International Laboratories on Cognitive Robotics while I work on these projects and explore for International Collaborative Projects.

My aim is to set up a lab for Cognitive Robotics. Mechatronics and Vision complements cognitive robotics to a great extent. A Cognitive Robotics Lab would need to be a joint effort with people working in Mechatronics, Systems and Computer Vision. I foresee more and more people working in this area in the years to come and a number of M.Tech. and PhD dissertations being taken up. Slowly but surely, I have a plan to build a group seriously working on Cognitive Robotics.