This research instrumentation contributes to the acquisition, by the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Psychology, and Speech Language and Hearing, of a Cognitive Robot (base system, arm and hand manipulator, binocular color vision, laser ranger, sound reception and interpretation, and sound generation) enabling research projects in:
- Ambiguity Resolution in Spoken Language Understanding, - Ambiguity Resolution in Context Driven Active Robot Vision, - Ambiguity Resolution within the Memory System, and - Ambiguity Resolution in Robot Reasoning and Actuation.
The Cognitive Robot, with visual, speech, movement, and hand/arm manipulation capabilities, will enable research plausible interactions among the processes of ambiguity resolution in multiple cognitive subsystems including subsystems for speech and natural language understanding, scene interpretation, the retrieval of appropriate memory context, and robot planning and action execution. The research methodology is to integrate together computational models of these various ambiguity resolution processes of these subsystems into the Cognitive Robot and to test them in an integrated fashion by observing the behavior of the Cognitive Robot. The significance of this research lies in the fact that ambiguity in one subsystem can often only be resolved by the ambiguity resolution capabilities of the other subsystems. Thus, the study of ambiguity resolution in each of the four research projects using the Cognitive Robot will be enhanced by its integration with the ambiguity resolution capabilities of the others. Since the human capability for effortlessly resolving ambiguity seems to be a fundamental aspect of intelligence, an explication of the interactions among the ambiguity resolution capabilities of these subsystems may be highly significant.
