Intelligence in design: robots as blank slates for study

Intelligence and stupidity are delicate topics. They reflect assessments of character that can scar or heal us. Yet, what it means to be intelligent or stupid is, well, confusing. Worse yet, use of intelligence and stupidity as labels are far from universal. Anyone who has ever defended a beloved pet's maligned intelligence would know how fine the line dividing the haves and the have-nots truly is. What makes a fox cleverer than an ant or a gorilla stupider than a chimpanzee? And, even more puzzling, why are robots and androids presented as idealized forms of intelligence?

There are several definitions of intelligence. Some claim that intelligence is reflected in the ability to learn from stimuli. Others say that intelligence lies in the ability to understand, alter and create abstract concepts. Generally, intelligence is assigned to higher cognitive functions once attributed to humans alone. Later, humans granted dogs the capacity for intelligence, later all mammals, and so on. In fact, examples of observable intelligence are more ubiquitous than most might want to imagine. Fruit flies, ants, and the common garden slug can learn. More astonishing is that even those single-celled organisms that many of us tortured in junior high school, the paramecia, are trainable.

Of course, whether the paramecia are truly intelligent depends on the definition of intelligence. However, all forms of life seem to have an innate learning capacity, which may even precede the emergence of a nervous system. This makes it hard to define intelligence in biological terms, as all animal models can learn. Researchers need an empty-headed model for comparisons yielding insight into biological intelligence. For this they turn to robots.

"I wanted to know what intelligence was, to understand humans," explains Dr. Emilia Barakova, a Bulgarian-born scientist with RIKEN Brain Science Institute in central Japan. "I was drawn to robots because they are stupid." Each time she talked about what a robot could and could not do, she chuckled, as you might while watching a cat fall off the sofa. At least the cat would appear embarrassed; a robot would just sit there expressionless. Before it can explore an environment or complete a task, it requires instructions for execution of basic movements, decision-making and mapmaking.

"How can we teach intelligent behavior," Barakova asks, "if we do not understand intelligence ourselves?"

Picture "Opportunity," one of the two almost adorable rovers on Mars, stuck in the sand not too long ago. Sure it could take pictures that gave the brains back home some idea of the problem, but it had to wait for instructions teaching it how to adapt its tools to digging itself out.

Dynamic behavior that would enable real-time responses to novel situations and truly independent behavior is still not possible in robots designed to be autonomous. Not only would they need to learn how to map new environments and locate themselves within that map, they would also need to be able to recognize the area despite changes to it or their starting positions on subsequent visits.

Until recently, Barakova was a robotics researcher at a German-managed laboratory in Kitakyushu, where she worked on designs to improve automatic mobility and self-navigation in small carlike robots. She joined the lab, which combined the Germans' innovative work with the Japanese focus on humanized robots, from a desire to explore ways to design robots that could learn, think, and be creative.

The problems with full autonomy

Are "Spirit" and "Opportunity" fully autonomous robots on Mars or merely fancy remote-controlled cars? The latter: they are costly, old-fashioned toys with some sophisticated equipment. NASA might prefer describing the pair as robotic extensions of ourselves that enable exploration of remote places, but the point is clear.

"These robots are semi-autonomous. In many cases they must be operated from Earth," says Barakova. The rovers on Mars are shining examples of classic robotic design, which develops robust, highly functional, reprogrammable robots.

Barakova herself designed soccerplaying robots for the Robotic Football Challenge.

They had one purpose: to score a goal on a penalty kick. Period. Her robots cannot plan adaptively. Nor do they have a sense of reward that makes scoring so important. This is to say, like "Spirit" and "Opportunity," they are further examples of classic robot design. Barakova recognizes feelingly the yawing gap between robotics and human behavior.

For autonomous movement, the robot needs to localize and simultaneously create a map or have algorithms enabling navigation of its environment. It also needs to adapt in response to changes in its environment and in its perceptual inputs--that is, a robot needs to process information dynamically in real-time.