Exploding Aardvark

Whereas we humans use the word ‘ball’ to refer to a ball, the AIBO dogs start from scratch to develop common agreement on a word to use to refer the ball. They also develop the language structures to express, for instance, that the ball is rolling to the left. The researchers achieved this through instilling their robots with a sense of ‘curiosity.’

Initially programmed to merely recognise stimuli from their sensors, the AIBOs learnt to distinguish between objects and how to interact with them over the course of several hours or days. The curiosity system, or ‘metabrain,’ continually forced the AIBOs to look for new and more challenging tasks, and to give up on activities that did not appear to lead anywhere. This in turn led them to learn how to perform more complex tasks, an indication of an open-ended learning capability much like that of human children.

Also like children, the AIBOs initially started babbling aimlessly until two or more settled on a sound to describe an object or aspect of their environment, gradually building a lexicon and grammatical rules through which to communicate.

Teaching robot dogs linguistic tricks (Engineer, via Robot Gossip) ECAgents project website