Researchers at the University of Hertfordshire are incorporating cognitive skills into a new robot, which is to help people who have damaged limbs to walk again.
A grant of €780,800 has been given to Dr Daniel Polani and his team at the School of Computer Science at the University for the four year Research Project. This project, Cognitive Control Framework for Robotic Systems (CORBYS)’s main purpose is to build the cognitive features in the robots.
Dr. Polani reveals that there are some robots, which help people in walking; but as they need constant monitoring and attention from therapists they do not do their jobs efficiently. With this project, the goal was to build robots that could understand the needs of the humans and operate autonomously. Dr Polani along with his team members would supply these robots with a high level of cognitive control capacities, which would mesh with human behavior. This project is based on biologically inspired methodologies and principles, which have been created at the School of Computer Science during the past years.
Moreover, he states that they believed that all organisms use information and efficiently organize them, which would help them to make decisions. These techniques would also help the robots to support the humans and also create a balance between the robot, which leads and the human being it supports. During the four year period, the project would develop two demonstrators and a modern mobile robotic gait rehabilitation system, which is capable of learning how to match the needs of the user during the various stages of rehabilitation. Dr Polani works along with Dr Farshid Amirabadollohian and Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn on CORBYS.
Source: http://www.onlinetmd.com