Bio-inspired solutions for intelligent android perception and control

Summary form only given. After more than half of century of manufacturing-oriented robotics, robots are now evolving and expanding into new applications involving a human-style interaction with people in unstructured environments. Such an endeavour requires a different set of skills for the new generation of robots, which are expected to exhibit an increased ability to intelligently connect perception to action. Due to their expected omnipresence in the lives of people, the new-generation robots should be sensitive to the attitudes and expectations of normal people. They should be endowed with more efficient interaction capabilities allowing for a higher degree of flexibility and autonomy in order to make appropriate decisions in routine and emergency situations. In order to naturally blend within human society, the new-generation robots should not only look as humans, but should also behave as much as possible as humans. They are in a way expected to be, as initially imagined by Capek in his R.U.R. Rossum´s Universal Robots play, anthropomorphic artefacts, androids, enabled to think on their own and governed by Asimov´s laws of robotics hardwired into every robot´s positronic brain. While for a long time, engineers have built upon mathematics, physics and chemistry in order to develop an ever growing variety of industrial artefacts and machines, this approach cannot anymore rise to the challenge of designing these androids. The time has now arrived to add biology and more specifically, human anatomy, physiology and psychology to the scientific sources of knowledge to develop a new, bio-inspired, generation of intelligent androids. Advocating this emergent trend, this presentation will discuss a number of relevant issues such as bioinspired robot sensors and neural networks, humanrobot interaction techniques for symbiotic partnership, as well as moral, ethical, theological, legal, and social challenges in a soon-to-be cyborgsociety world.