Coupling perception and simulation: steps towards conversational robotics

Human cognition makes extensive use of visualization and imagination. As a first step towards giving a robot similar abilities, we have built a robotic system that uses a perceptually-coupled physical simulator to produce an internal world model of the robot's environment. Real-time perceptual coupling ensures that the model is constantly kept in synchronization with the physical environment as the robot moves and obtains new sense data. This model allows the robot to be aware of objects no longer in its field of view (a form of "object permanence"), as well as to visualize its environment through the eyes of the user by enabling virtual shifts in point of view using synthetic vision operating within the simulator. This architecture provides a basis for our long term goals of developing conversational robots that can ground the meaning of spoken language in terms of sensorimotor representations.