CIS Department Talk - Friday April 15, 2005

The Department of Computer and Information Science & The Society of Computer Science Present

Speaker:	Dr. Damian Lyons
Topic:	Robots: Computers with Legs or Mechanical Minds
Date:	Friday April 15, 2005 at 10:00 am
Place:	John Mulcahy Hall, Room 404

In this talk we will review the historical approaches to the problem of building robust, autonomous robotic systems. Much of the early literature concerned the construction of a robot control device with sufficient "intelligence" to plan and reason successfully about robotic actions; we refer to this as the mechanized mind approach. However, ultimately this approach was not successful, and an alternative approach was developed by several different researchers at around the same time; we refer to this as the "computers with legs" approach. We will present examples of several systems built using this approach and discuss why they are more successful than systems built with the mechanized mind approach. We conclude with a broader discussion of why the most intuitive approach, the "mechanized mind" approach, could not be successful and how this may relate to the human mind.