Students

Part 3: In his third and final lecture, David Vernon discusses recent developments in cognition research. He addresses the common model of cognition that emcompasses approaches in Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Robotics. It is mainly based on the book "Unified theories of cognition" by Allen Newell, a leading investigator in computer science and cognitive psychology. Newell states that cognition takes place over multiple timescales (from millisecond-level to year-level and everything in between).

In their lecture, Jürgen Sturm and Christoph Schütte from Google Germany talk about the Google’s Cloud Robotics project before diving deeper into specific robot perception problems. Christoph Schütte introduces Cartographer, a system that provides real-time simultaneous localization and mapping, also called SLAM, in 2D and 3D across multiple platforms. Jürgen Sturm closes the lecture with semantic mapping and spatial intelligence in artificial intelligence.

Part 2: In his follow-up lecture, David Vernon dives deeper into the role of memory, especially in a system. Memory, as he states, is a process rather than a state. He presents different types of memory, explores the role of memory, explains the concept of self-projection, prospection, and internal simulation, and clarifies technical terminology from cognitive science and psychology as well as from robotic literature. He concludes with internal simulation combined with action, and with the concept of forgetting which is important but still not fully understood in neuroscience.

Part 1: In his first of three talks, David Vernon gives a concise and coherent overview of cognitive architecture. He begins by explaining the concept of cognition as an umbrella term that encompasses perception, learning, anticipation, action, and adaptation. Cognition allows robots to work independently in challenging environments, to adapt to changes, and to anticipate events in preparing their actions. If cognition was the top of a mountain and the goal to be achieved, architecture would be the base camp that needs to be set up first.

This course is published by David Vernon in 2020. The course "covers both the essentials of classical robotics (mobile robots, robot arms for manipulation, and robot vision) and the principles of cognition (cognitive architectures, learning and development, prospection, memory, knowledge representation, internal simulation, and meta-cognition).