Lola Canamero | CY Cergy Paris Université (original) (raw)

Papers by Lola Canamero

Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Aug 26, 2016

Using an epigenetic model, in this paper we investigate the importance of sensorimotor experience... more Using an epigenetic model, in this paper we investigate the importance of sensorimotor experiences and environmental conditions in the emergence of more advanced cognitive abilities in an autonomous robot. We let the robot develop in three environments affording very different (physical and social) sensorimotor experiences: a "normal," standard environment, with reasonable opportunities for stimulation, a "novel" environment that offers many novel experiences, and a "sensory deprived" environment where the robot has very limited chances to interact. We then (a) assess how these different experiences influence and change the robot's ongoing development and behavior; (b) compare the said development to the different sensorimotor stages that infants go through; and (c) finally, after each "baby" robot has had time to develop in its environment, we recreate and assess its cognitive abilities using different well-known tests used in developmental psychology such as the violation of expectation (VOE) paradigm. Although our model was not explicitly designed following Piaget's or any other developmental theory, we observed, and discuss in the paper, that relevant sensorimotor experiences, or the lack of, result in the robot going through unforeseen developmental "stages" bearing some similarities to infant development, and could be interpreted in terms of Piaget's theory.

Artificial Life, 2008

Virtual ecosystems, where natural selection is used to evolve complex agent behavior, are often p... more Virtual ecosystems, where natural selection is used to evolve complex agent behavior, are often preferred to traditional genetic algorithms because the absence of an explicitly defined fitness allows for a less constrained evolutionary process. However, these model ecosystems typically pre-specify a discrete set of possible action primitives the agents can perform. We think that this also constrains the evolutionary process with the modellers preconceptions of what possible solutions could be. Therefore, we propose an ecosystem model to evolve complete agents where all higher-level behavior results strictly from the interplay between extremely simple components and where no 'behavior primitives' are defined. On the basis of four distinct survival strategies we show that such primitives are not necessary to evolve behavioral diversity even in a simple and homogeneous environment.

Artificial Life, 2010

Taking inspiration from the biological world, in our work we are attempting to create and examine... more Taking inspiration from the biological world, in our work we are attempting to create and examine artificial predator-prey relationships using two LEGO robots. We do so to explore the possible adaptive value of emotion-like states for action selection in this context. However, we also aim to study and consider these concepts together at different levels of abstraction. For example, in terms of individual agents’ brain-bodyenvironment interactions, as well as the (emergent) predatorprey relationships resulting from these. Here, we discuss some of the background concepts and motivations driving the design of our implementation and experiments. First, we explain why we think the predator-prey relationship is so interesting. Narrowing our focus to emotion-based architectures, this is followed by a review of existing literature, comparing different types and highlighting the novel aspects of our own. We conclude with our proposed contributions to the literature and thus, ultimately, the design and creation of artificial life.

Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Oct 19, 2020

Cybernetics and Systems, Jul 1, 2001

... Address correspondence to Lola Ca·amero, Department of Computer Science, Uni-versity of Hertf... more ... Address correspondence to Lola Ca·amero, Department of Computer Science, Uni-versity of Hertfordshire, College Lane, Hat¢eld, Herts AL10 9AB ... signals that can be used to recognize that opportunities for the satisfaction of goals/concerns, and occurrences of threats might be ...

International Journal of Social Robotics, Jun 5, 2013

The goal of the work presented here was to find a model of a spiking sensory neuron that could co... more The goal of the work presented here was to find a model of a spiking sensory neuron that could cope with small variations of a simulated pheromone concentration and also the whole range of concentrations. We tried many different functions to map the pheromone concentration into the current of the sensory neuron in order to produce a near linear relationship between the concentration and the firing rate of the sensor. After unsuccessful trials using linear currents, we created an equation that would by definition achieve this task and used it as a model to help us find a similar function that is also used in biology. We concluded that by using a biologically plausible sigmoid function in our model to map pheromone concentration to current, we could produce agents able to detect the whole range of pheromone concentration as well as small variations. Now, the sensory neurons used in our model are able to encode the stimulus intensity into appropriate firing rates.

Cybernetics and Systems, Sep 1, 2001

This is the second volume of extended versions of contributions presented at the Workshop ``Groun... more This is the second volume of extended versions of contributions presented at the Workshop ``Grounding Emotions in Adaptive Systems’’ held at the 5th International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB’98) at the University of Zurich, on August 21, 1998. As for the ¢rst volume, each paper underwent multiple reviewing, and we do not want to fail to thank all the colleagues involved in this laborious process once more. Unlike the papers in the sibling volume of this issue, some contributions of the present collection did not receive unanimous appreciation from reviewers and/or the very editors. The reasons we still resolved to grant publication to these submissions were at least twofold. On the one hand, the area of computational research in emotions is still at such an early stage that exposure to a wider range of facets of the phenomenon under investigationöas illustrated by both background literature as well as modelling approaches covered in this special issueöcan be expected to be of particular bene¢t for the readership; relatedly, it is quite dif¢cult as an author to do justice to all critical comments from the multitude of perspectives this area is being looked at, while remaining within the con¢nes of a journal articleöa problem that, however, we feel should not end up effectively preventing the dissemination of relevant information. On the other hand, we do not want to put in second place the purpose of scienti¢c journals to serve as platform to pick out and discuss background issues against which current research is being carried out, as exempli¢ed by a number of Cybernetics and Systems: An International Journal, 32 :581± 583, 2001 Copyright # 2001 Taylor & Francis 0196-9722/01 $12.00 + .00

Frontiers in Robotics and AI

In dynamic (social) environments, an affective state of “stress” can be adaptive and promote agen... more In dynamic (social) environments, an affective state of “stress” can be adaptive and promote agent wellbeing, but maladaptive if not appropriately regulated. The presence of (and interactions with) affect-based social support has been hypothesised to provide mechanisms to regulate stress (the “social buffering” hypothesis), though the precise, underlying mechanisms are still unclear. However, the hormone oxytocin has been implicated in mediating these effects in at least two ways: by improving social appraisals and reducing the short-term release of stress hormones (i.e., cortisol), and adapting an agent’s long-term stress tolerance. These effects likely facilitate an agent’s long-term adaptive ability by grounding their physiological and behavioural adaptation in the (affective) social environment, though these effects also appear to be context-dependent. In this paper, we investigate whether two of the hypothesised hormonal mechanisms that underpin the “social buffering” phenomeno...

The 2021 Conference on Artificial Life

The "social buffering" phenomenon proposes that social support facilitates wellbeing by reducing ... more The "social buffering" phenomenon proposes that social support facilitates wellbeing by reducing stress in a number of different ways. While this phenomenon may benefit agents with social support from others, its potential effects on the wider social group are less clear. Using a biologicallyinspired artificial life model, we have investigated how some of the hypothesised hormonal mechanisms that underpin the "social buffering" phenomenon affect the wellbeing and interactions of agents without social support across numerous social and physical contexts. We tested these effects in a small, rank-based society, with half of the agents endowed with numerous hormonal mechanisms associated with "social buffering", and half without. Surprisingly, our results found that these "social buffering" mechanisms provided survivalrelated advantages to agents without social support across numerous conditions. We found that agents with sociallyadaptive mechanisms themselves become a proxy for adaptation, and suggest that, in some (artificial) societies, "social buffering" may be a contagious phenomenon.

From Animals to Animats 7, 2002

... Almost all protocols for remote services (CORBA, SOAP, etc.) assume the programmer is anetwor... more ... Almost all protocols for remote services (CORBA, SOAP, etc.) assume the programmer is anetworks specialist. ... This paper suggests a method by which a set of novelty filters can be trained for different ... (Gurney et al., 2001a, Gurney et al., 2001b) based on neural circuits located ...

The Best Contributed Talk was awarded to Nathan Counsel for his outstanding Oral Presentation tit... more The Best Contributed Talk was awarded to Nathan Counsel for his outstanding Oral Presentation titled "Development of enhanced power generation for piezoelectric energy harvesting" The Best Poster was awarded to Rebecca Miko for her outstanding Poster Presentation titled "Braininspired spiking neural network for gas-based navigation" Congratulations to our delegates for their excellent contributions.

We describe the social characteristics of a robot developed to support children with Type 1 Diabe... more We describe the social characteristics of a robot developed to support children with Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM) in the process of education and care. We evaluated the perception of the robot at a summer camp where diabetic children aged 10-14 experienced the robot in group interactions. Children in the intervention condition additionally interacted with it also individually, in one-to-one sessions featuring several game-like activities. These children perceived the robot significantly more as a friend than those in the control group. They also readily engaged with it in dialogues about their habits related to healthy lifestyle as well as personal experiences concerning diabetes. This indicates that the one-on-one interactions added a special quality to the relationship of the children with the robot.

Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems, 2020

In this paper we consider how non-humanoid robots can communicate their affective state via bodil... more In this paper we consider how non-humanoid robots can communicate their affective state via bodily forms of communication (kinesics), and the extent to which this influences how humans respond to them. We propose a simple model of grounded affect and kinesic expression before presenting the qualitative findings of an exploratory study (N = 9), during which participants were interviewed after watching expressive and non-expressive hexapod robots perform different 'scenes'. A summary of these interviews is presented and a number of emerging themes are identified and discussed. Whilst our findings suggest that the expressive robot did not evoke significantly greater empathy or altruistic intent in humans than the control robot, the expressive robot stimulated greater desire for interaction and was also more likely to be attributed with emotion.

Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 2021

Artificial Life 14: Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems, 2014

In the context of our work on dyadic robot-human (caregiver) interaction from a developmental rob... more In the context of our work on dyadic robot-human (caregiver) interaction from a developmental robotics perspective, in this paper we investigate how an autonomous robot that explores and learns novel environments can make use of its arousal system to detect situations that constitute learning challenges, and request help from a human at points where this help is most needed and can be most beneficial. In a set of experiments, our robot learns to classify and recognize the perceptual properties of various objects placed on a table. We show that the arousal system of the robot permits it to identify and react to incongruent and novel features in the environment. More specifically, our results show that the robot identifies perceived outliers and episodic perceptual anomalies. As in the case of young infants, arousal variations trigger regulatory behaviours that engage caregivers in helping behaviors. We conclude that this attachment-based architecture provides a generic process that permits a robot to request interventions from a human caregiver during relevant events.