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From Animals to Robots and Back: Reflections on Hard Problems in the Study of Cognition pp 107–118Cite as

Building for the Future: Architectures for the Next Generation of Intelligent Robots

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Part of the book series: Cognitive Systems Monographs ((COSMOS,volume 22))

Abstract

In this article I explore two ideas. The first is that the idea of architectures for intelligent systems is ripe for exploitation given the current state of component technologies and available software. The second idea is that in order to encourage progress in architecture research, we must concentrate on research methodologies that prevent us from continually reinventing and reimplementing existing work. The two ideas I propose for this are building software toolkits that provide useful architectures for the way researchers currently develop systems, and focusing on architectural design patterns, rather than whole architectures.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I will use the first person in this article where it seems appropriate given the personal nature of these reflections and their context in the symposium.

  2. 2.

    See, for example, the amazing impact Willow Garage’s PR2 is having across research groups in the US, or the impressive entrants in this year’s RoboCup@Home competition.

  3. 3.

    Just show up suitably early for any robotics demo, competition or project review to see what I mean. And I should add that I have spent many long days and nights in feverish demo prep.

  4. 4.

    It may be the case that such change is not noticeable over short periods, particularly when compared with the changes apparent to an architecture’s contents.

  5. 5.

    A collection of related software packages for the Robot Operating System.

  6. 6.

    See Sect. 8.5.1.

  7. 7.

    Related to this, it is worth noting that architecture toolkits seem to inspire a particularly strong strain of not-invented-here syndrome.

  8. 8.

    Sometimes called interaction patterns in the software architecture literature, although these patterns focus typically on communication patterns between components, rather than larger functional units.

  9. 9.

    This is the architecture I contributed to whilst building systems using CAST (Hawes and Wyatt 2010).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Nick Hawes

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  1. Nick Hawes
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  1. School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom

    Jeremy L. Wyatt

  2. School of Social Sciences, University of Northampton, Northampton, United Kingdom

    Dean D. Petters

  3. School of Computing, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom

    David C. Hogg

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Hawes, N. (2014). Building for the Future: Architectures for the Next Generation of Intelligent Robots. In: Wyatt, J., Petters, D., Hogg, D. (eds) From Animals to Robots and Back: Reflections on Hard Problems in the Study of Cognition. Cognitive Systems Monographs, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06614-1_8

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