A modular approach to self-organization of robot control based on language instruction

In this paper we focus on how instructions for actions can be modelled in a self-organizing memory. Our approach draws from the concepts of regional distributed modularity and self-organization. We describe a self-organizing model that clusters action representations into different locations dependent on the body part they are related to. In the first case study we consider semantic representations of action verb meaning and then extend this concept significantly in a second case study by using actual sensor readings from our MIRA robot. Furthermore, we outline a modular model for a self-organizing robot action control system using language for instruction. Our approach for robot control using language incorporates some evidence related to the architectural and processing characteristics of the brain (Wermter et al. 2001b). This paper focuses on the neurocognitive clustering of actions and regional modularity for language areas in the brain. In particular, we describe a self-organizing network that realizes action clustering (Pulvermüller 2003).     

An attention-gating recurrent working memory architecture for emergent speech representation

This paper describes an attention-gating recurrent self-organising map approach for emergent speech representation. Inspired by evidence from human cognitive processing, the architecture combines two main neural components. The first component, the attention-gating mechanism, uses actor–critic learning to perform selective attention towards speech. Through this selective attention approach, the attention-gating mechanism controls access to working memory processing. The second component, the recurrent self-organising map memory, develops a temporal-distributed representation of speech using phone-like structures. Representing speech in terms of phonetic features in an emergent self-organised fashion, according to research on child cognitive development, recreates the approach found in infants. Using this representational approach, in a fashion similar to infants, should improve the performance of automatic recognition systems through aiding speech segmentation and fast word learning.     

A hybrid deep learning neural approach for emotion recognition from facial expressions for socially assistive robots

We have recently seen significant advancements in the development of robotic machines that are designed to assist people with their daily lives. Socially assistive robots are now able to perform a number of tasks autonomously and without human supervision. However, if these robots are to be accepted by human users, there is a need to focus on the form of human–robot interaction that is seen as acceptable by such users. In this paper, we extend our previous work, originally presented in Ruiz-Garcia et al. (in: Engineering applications of neural networks: 17th international conference, EANN 2016, Aberdeen, UK, September 2–5, 2016, proceedings, pp 79–93, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44188-7_6), to provide emotion recognition from human facial expressions for application on a real-time robot. We expand on previous work by presenting a new hybrid deep learning emotion recognition model and preliminary results using this model on real-time emotion recognition performed by our humanoid robot. The hybrid emotion recognition model combines a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for self-learnt feature extraction and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) for emotion classification. Compared to more complex approaches that use more layers in the convolutional model, this hybrid deep learning model produces state-of-the-art classification rate of \(96.26\%\), when tested on the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces dataset (Lundqvist et al. in The Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces—KDEF, 1998), and offers similar performance on unseen data when tested on the Extended Cohn–Kanade dataset (Lucey et al. in: Proceedings of the third international workshop on CVPR for human communicative behaviour analysis (CVPR4HB 2010), San Francisco, USA, pp 94–101, 2010). This architecture also takes advantage of batch normalisation (Ioffe and Szegedy in Batch normalization: accelerating deep network training by reducing internal covariate shift. http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03167, 2015) for fast learning from a smaller number of training samples. A comparison between Gabor filters and CNN for feature extraction, and between SVM and multilayer perceptron for classification is also provided.