December 29, 2017

• Continue with the fourth chapter of Intelligent Behavior in Animals and Robots. McFarland gives an example of sterotype behavior (described by Tinbergen) of a greylag goose, which finishes always its egg-retrieving behavior, even when it it halfway looses contact with the egg.
• McFarland not only mentions the cost of being in a particular state (even doing nothing costs energy), the cost of performing a particular activity, but also assigns a cost to change between activities.

December 28, 2017

• Continue with the third chapter of Intelligent Behavior in Animals and Robots. McFarland indicates that Hobbs was a materialist, which explained everything originating from physilogical processes as pain and pleasure, which gave rise to emotions and influenced behavior. This was picked up by utilitarians, such as John Stuart Mill (1861). Did they evoluate into behaviorists (early twentiest century), who tried to measure the effect of pleasure and pain (i.e. Pavlov)?
• Bernoulli was responsible for what is now called diminishing marginal utility, which means that money is the universal standard, because it is for some more worth than others. Bernoulli (1738) suggested to couple it to moral worth or well-being. That lead to the theory of choice from Savage (1954) based a preference for the overall highest utility. Yet, Edgeworth indicated that the total utility is not a simple sum, but a combination of indifference curves. Pareto worked this further out.
• McFarland makes a parallel between economics and ethology. In ethology the decisions are evaluated based on costs (instead of utility). Every individual redecuces costs based on an objective function, if that objective function is well trained (by evolution), it is equal to the cost function (which is a characteristic of the environment, not of the individual or species).

December 27, 2017

• Continue with the first chapter of Intelligent Behavior in Animals and Robots. At page 21 McFarland claims that cognition involves declarative knowledge, worked out in Chapter 6, because if the situation could be automatically into sign stimuli, which makes a reflexive or behaviorial solution is possible.
• To create intelligent behavior, reasoning has to be coupled with meaning, which requires language.
• Yet, honeybees also have language, and even dialects. One waggle indicates about 5 meters to an Egyptian honeybee, about 25 meters to an Italian bee and 75 meters to an German bee.
• Many aspects of human behavior do not involve cognition: spatial orientation is sophisticated, prewired adaptive control system (Howard 1982).
• Unfortunatelly, only a summary but no questions at the end of the chapter.
• Chapter 2 is about rational behavior: a rational person should be able to muster a good defense of a belief when the occasion demands, yet not every belef is under constant or conscous deliberation.
• Ordering is easier from big to small than from small to big. Measured in humans, children and monkeys.

December 21, 2017

• Read the introduction from Intelligent Behavior in Animals and Robots, which is actually from 1993. There the point one of the founders of Cognitive Psychology, George A. Miller, with his test-operate-test-exit (TOTE) architecture, which is claimed to be influencial for AI (up to 1993). Note that Muller was also one of the inventors of WordNet.
• According to the introduction, the cognitive approach is equivalent with cybernetics, and was later replaced by BDI architectures, which is according a failure due to Turing's claim on accuntable rationality. According to them that is projection, a primate heritage to require continual assessments of "intentions" (de Waal).
• The first chapter starts with a nice quote: "anthropomorphism is an incurable disease ... - resisting the temptation to interpret the behavior of other agents in terms of our own subjective experience. ... Making robots forces us to address issues that we might otherwise overlook or avoid, and it provides some acid tests for models and theories of behavior."
• Another nice one: "Much human behavior is highly instinctive ..., while much animal behavior is based on learning."
• An example that I can use in the lectures: the evading behavior of a moth based on two different sensors.
• Fig. 1.8 is also nice to use.

December 18, 2017

• Interesting conference, unfortunatelly the week overlaps with the Matlab visit (and the Bachelor day).
• Another interesting conference is ALife, end of July 2018 in Japan.

December 6, 2017

• Looked at the first assignment with DownyJr (offset HipYawPitch). Could connect with Choregraphe. Made connection with robolab wireless.
• Just giving the command python config.py gives the getMainModule().start(): object has no attribute 'start'.
• Followed the instructions and created main.py, still same AttributeError.
• Next step: created globals.py, same error message.
• Last step: registering the modules. After correcting the type of quotes and an extra tab in main.py it works.
• Finished Hello World (part 1). Part 2 is walking, so then I need another robot than DownJr.

December 4, 2017

• Neuromorphic chips as strange new ways to compute.

November 30, 2017

• Found the following summary on studeersnel.nl. Difficult flashcards!
• Found a 2011 description of a Behavior-Based Robotics course kth.se, but couldn't found further details.
• Chapter 1, 3, 4 are used at TU Dortmund.
• For the first assignment, they point to Behavior Coordination Mechanisms State-of-the-Art by Paolo Pirjanian, 1999 (49 pages).

October 17, 2017

• Found a reference to article of Henry Markram, which combines several groups of all-to-all connected neurons (cliques) to cavities that guide the emergence of correlated activity.
• I most liked Figure S3 in the supplemantary material, which analyzed the Betti number (as indication for the non-connections of the cavities) for C. Elegans. The activity is demonstrated in Fig. 6, where the demonstrate that the Betti number (B_1 vs B_3) changes over time when stimuli are given, indicating that connections are tried (between cliques).

September 18, 2017

• Proceedings of Love and Sex with Robots, including sample pages.
• The video TroodyClips.mpeg on mobile robots site is a skeleton Bird robot.

August 21, 2017

• I read a summary of Dieren met Toekomstplannen. Could be nice for anectdotes.

August 14, 2017

• According to IEEE Spectrum, Facebook, Tesla and eBay are bussy with new Brain Tech devices.

August 11, 2017

• Read the special issue from IEEE Spectrum about neurocomputation.
• Was most surprised about the article from Koch and Tononi, which talked about integrated information theory, and the claim that they have found a location in the brain for consciousness and a means to measure it.

July 11, 2017

• Found this Introduction to robotics.
• Found this Future of robotics.

June 4, 2017

• Read ACM article about BabyX. A link to Auckland Face Simulator is provided. Also a link to BabyX v3.0 is available. Didn't see a download of their Behavioral Language at their site.

May 23, 2017

• Maybe interesting: “Artificial humans”: Psychology and neuroscience perspectives on embodiment and nonverbal communication.
• An article about bio-inspired memristor approach to reconstruct images. The memristor networks are trained by locally competitive algorithm (LCA) analysis.

May 9, 2017

• Read an article about ERICA: The ERATO Intelligent Conversational Android.

April 12, 2017

• Read an article about the Virtual Physiological Human. It concentrates on patient-specific computer geometries, so this could be interesting for the mechatronics of robots.

February 9, 2017

• There are 15 groups.

February 8, 2017

• If I want to cancel the midterm exam and have a lecture, then there is an empty slot on Tuesday 28/2 from 9:00-11:00 (or 13:00-15:00).

February 2, 2017

• Reading Adaptive Morphology, which give many recent examples for bioinspired locomotion (walking and flying).

January 31, 2017

• Reading Lessons from Animals and Plants, which refers to the MIT book How the Body Shapes the Way We Think.
• The preface of the book points to the site , but this redirects to a Turorial on Embodiment.
• The section about Connectionism could be the start of a nice question. Connectionism is only mentioned on p. 47 of Arkin, as alternative bottom-up approach in contrast of the Cognitive psychology of Neisser and the information approach of Eyseneck. The section points to Hofstadter, which Waking up from Boolean dream, or, subcognition as computation raises some interesting questions. Overall, Hofstadter sees that in principel cognition can be seen as computation, but that the metaphor is off. This in contrast with Searle's never (Chinese Room argument) and Simon & Newell nearly, with their Physical Symbol Systems Hypothesis from Cognitivism.
• The most recent psychological trend is Enactivism. Di Paolo, in Horizons for the enactive mind: Values, social interaction, and play towards (Beer 2003; Brooks 1991; Harvey et al. 1996; Nolfi and Floreano 2000; Winograd and Flores 1986).
• Lessons from Animals and Plants, points to the Yale book Simplexity, for elegant simplification mechanisms in neural circuitry of some human sensory-motor loops.

January 26, 2017

• Was looking for the video of the drones flying in formation through windows, but couldn't find it. Payed a visit to Jurgen's visual navigation course.

January 25, 2017

• Read "Dimensions of communication and social organization in multi-agent robotic systems", from Arkin and Hobb, which was refered on page 360 (chapter 9).
• In Section 2 Arkin claims that Schema Theory is based on the cognitve theories of Normal and Shallice & Niesser.
• Section 3 is the relevant part, discussing the examples also found in the book, but now clustered in five areas:
  • system reliability
  • social organization
  • communication
  • multi-agent searching
  • coordination
  For the coordination, Arkin describes lekking, coming together in a a communal breeding display on a lek, where each male defends a small territory in order to attract females.

January 19, 2017

• Scanned Coloured Circle Pattern, because the 2 Blobs from Duncan had the right colour, but other colours (no green):
  
• Tried to find the pattern of the Aibo ERS7 station marker, but could find any. Could only one functional Aibo charger. Tried Carlos and Lewy to perform homing, but only Mina didn't crash after standing up. Yet, Mina is the Aibo with the broken leg, and showed the following error-message on her face when commanded to walk:
  
• With an other battery Carlos was able to start the homing behavior (but crashed before reaching the charing station because the battery wasn't fully charged).

January 18, 2017

• The attendance at the Tuesday lectures (no practicum that day) were low. Should combine that in the schedule next year.
• Checked for hybrid videos with the architecture chapter (chapter 12) of the Handbook, but only one on shopfloor automation.

January 17, 2017

• Video ID 34 of chapter 13 is about the Nerd Herd (but unfortunatelly the same bad qualitity as I have in my presentation).

January 14, 2017