Will robots pick strawberries?

Will robots see?

Will robots ever really see? Imagine a robot 10,000 years in the future. At that time we should finally understand the visual system and be able to build robots whose visual performance surpasses humans'. We will then ask: when a robot claims to be seeing, are its sensations the same as mine? The problem is to connect the first person "feel" of an event (qualia) to the third person performance ...

Approximation Algorithms for Pick-and-Place Robots

In this paper we study the problem of finding placement tours for pick-and-place robots, also known as the printed circuit board assembly problem with m positions on a board, n bins containing m components and n locations for the bins. In the standard model where the working time of the robot is proportional to the distances travelled, the general problem appears as a combination of the travell...

Why Robots Will Have Emotions

Emotions involve complex processes produced by i n te rac t i ons between motives/ b e l i e f s / percepts , e t c . E.g. real or imagined f u l f i l m e n t or v i o l a t i o n of a mot ive/ or t r i g g e r i n g of a 'mot ive-genera tor ' / can d i s tu rb processes produced by other mot ives. To understand emotions/ t he re fo re / we need to understand motives and the types of processes...

Free will - even for robots

Human free will is a product of evolution and contributes to the success of the human animal. Useful robots will also require free will of a similar kind, and we will have to design it into them. Free will is not an all-or-nothing thing. Some agents have more free will, or free will of different kinds, than others, and we will try to analyze this phenomenon. Our objectives are primarily technol...

Free Will|even for Robots