Email.coordinator
Address.coordinator
Angelo Cangelosi
University of Plymouth
A316 Portland Square
PL 4 8AA Plymouth
United Kingdom
Phone.coordinator
+44 1752 586217
01. Home
The ITALK project aims to develop artificial embodied agents able to acquire complex behavioural, cognitive, and linguistic skills through individual and social learning. This will be achieved through experiments with the iCub humanoid robot to learn to handle and manipulate objects and tools autonomously, to cooperate and communicate with other robots and humans, and to adapt to changing internal, environmental, and social conditions.
The project will lead to
- the development of new theoretical insights, models and scientific explanations of the integration of action, social and linguistic skills to bootstrap cognitive development
- new interdisciplinary sets of methods for analysing the interaction of language, action and cognition in humans and artificial cognitive agents,
- new cognitively-plausible engineering principles and approaches for the design of robots with behavioural, cognitive, social and linguistic skills
- robotic experiments on object manipulation and language with the iCub robot
Research and methodologies
The studies will address the following research themes
- Action development and compositionality of action
- Embodied conceptualisation
- Social interaction and learning
- Emergence of language and compositional lexicons
- Integration and bootstrapping of action, language and cognition
- Demonstration and testing in humanoid robot iCub
The research will be based on the following methodologies
- Developmental and epigenetic robotics
- Neural network models of action and language grounding
- Developmental linguistics
- Neuroscience of action learning, imitation and gaze following
- Human-Robot experiments on social learning and interaction
- Experiments with physical and simulated iCub platform
