Robotic body-mind integration: next grand challenge in robotics

The field of robotics has evolved from industrial robots in the 1960s to entertainment and service robots in the 2000s. During the last decade, major progress has been made in integrating a robotic body with sensors and Al-based software. We describe our efforts to realize a next generation of intelligent robots called cognitive robots. Our work is embedded within a multiagent-based cognitive robot architecture with three distinctive memory systems: short-term and long-term memory structures for routine task execution and a working memory system (WMS) which is closely tied to learning and execution of tasks. The concept of WMS is relatively new in robotics and is expected to play a similar role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) of our brain that performs cognitive tasks.