Robotics experts from the University of California, Irvine. would present a robot that has a brain similar to the human brain in an upcoming robotics event.
Robotics experts around the world would meet this week in Hongkong at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation to present the latest technologies each team had developed in building robots that closely resemble men.
Participants in the conference were expected to show robots that would not only talk, walk, or recognize objects, but would display obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patterns just like humans. These robots would demonstrate their ability to arrange things, to recheck everything thrice, show fear of open spaces. The researchers believed that integrating fear on the software would make the robots think of better decisions.
"We're trying to make the robot brain more like human brain," said Jeff Krichmar, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine, to Discovery News.
Earlier robots were good on tasks involving computations such as playing chess, choosing the shortest route between two points, or solving math problems. The present state of robotics aims to do much more.
Krichmar and his team were developing a software that mimics the behavior of the laboratory rat that the team experimented using brain hormones dopamine and serotonin. By manipulating the rat's pleasure and pain centers, the team hoped to learn enough about the rat's behavior to turn into software for their robots.
"If you put a rodent in a room that is open and unfamiliar, it will hug the walls. It will hide until it becomes comfortable, then it will move across the room. It will wait until if feels comfortable. We did that with a robot and made it so it was so anxious it would never cross the room," Krichmar added.
The researchers copied the action of the chemicals to create mathematical models of the brain. The equation formed was then integrated to the software of the robot controller.
Michelle Rucci of Boston University, on the other hand, would present a robot with an eyeball that mimics humans’ ability to see and could measure the distance of an object in 3-D structure.
