Goal-Leaders · Goal-directed, Adaptive Builder Robots

The Goal-Leaders project aims at developing biologically-constrained architectures for the next generation of adaptive service robots, with unprecedented levels of goal-directedness and proactivity. Goal-Leaders will realize builder robots able to realize externally assigned tasks (e.g., fetching objects, composing building parts) and, at the same time, keeping their homeostatic drives within a safe range (e.g., never end up without energy or get hurt), by operating autonomously and for prolonged periods of time in open-ended environments. To this aim, Goal-Leaders will pursue a combined neuroscientific, computational and robotic study of three key sets of competences:-the biological and computational mechanisms behind an agent's goal system, which integrates somatic, affective, and cognitive elements, and realizes the setting and selection of the agent's goals;-the biological and computational mechanisms that support the assignment of situation-dependent value to an agent's state and action representations, and therefore realize the link between the agent's goal system and perceptual-motor processes;-the biological and computational mechanisms behind an agent's anticipatory and mental simulation abilities.The Goal-Leaders achievements beyond the state of the art will be assessed against behavioral and neuroscientific data, and by realizing three demonstrators in which robots will perform autonomous navigation and construction tasks, and will readapt without reprogramming to novel task allocations or changes in their environment.The project consortium includes a highly complementary, interdisciplinary team of top European researchers who focus on neuroscience, cognitive science, and robotics. Our robotic design methodology will have a significant impact both for the understanding of goal-directed action in living organisms, and for the realization of goal-directed service robots by combining navigation and manipulation within an unconstrained environment.