Cognitive Control Framework for Robotic Systems

CORBYS focus is on robotic systems that have symbiotic relationship with humans. Such robotic systems have to cope with highly dynamic environments as humans are demanding, curious and often act unpredictably. CORBYS will design and implement a cognitive robot control architecture that allows the integration of 1) high-level cognitive control modules, 2) a semantically-driven self-awareness module, and 3) a cognitive framework for anticipation of, and synergy with, human behaviour based on biologically-inspired information-theoretic principles. These modules, supported with an advanced multi-sensor system to facilitate dynamic environment perception, will endow the robotic systems with high-level cognitive capabilities such as situation-awareness, and attention control. This will enable the adaptation of robot behaviour, to the user's variable requirements, to be directed by cognitively adapted control parameters. CORBYS will provide a flexible and extensible architecture to benefit a wide range of applications; ranging from robotised vehicles and autonomous systems such as robots performing object manipulation tasks in an unstructured environment to systems where robots work in synergy with humans. The latter class of systems will be a special focus of CORBYS innovation as there exist important classes of critical applications where support for humans and robots sharing their cognitive capabilities is a particularly crucial requirement to be met. CORBYS control architecture will be validated within two challenging demonstrators: i) a novel mobile robot-assisted gait rehabilitation system CORBYS; ii) an existing autonomous robotic system. The CORBYS demonstrator to be developed during the project, will be a self-aware system capable of learning and reasoning that enables it to optimally match the requirements of the user at different stages of rehabilitation in a wide range of gait disorders.