Towards a “Brain-Guided” Cognitive Architecture - Bioinspired Approaches for Human-Centric Technologies - page 196

Chapter 7
Towards a “Brain-Guided” Cognitive
Architecture

Vishwanathan Mohan, Pietro Morasso, and Giulio Sandini

7.1 Introduction

Motor control and motor cognition have been under intensive scrutiny for over a
century with a growing number of experimental and theoretical tools of increasing
complexity. Still we are far away from a real understanding which can allow us, for
example, to integrate what we know in large-scale projects like VPH (Virtual
Physiological Human). In a sense, the abundance of new behavioral, neurophysio-
logical, and computational approaches may worsen the situation, by “flooding”
researchers with frequently incompatible evidence, losing view of the overall
picture. An aspect of this tendency is to quickly dismiss earlier “old-fashioned”
ideas on the basis of specific but narrow new evidence. This chapter argues in the
opposite direction, revisiting old-fashioned notions, like synergy formation, equi-
librium point hypothesis (EPH), and body schema, in order to reuse them in a larger
context, focused on whole-body actions: this context, typical of humanoid robotics,
stresses the need of efficient computational architectures, capable to defeat the curse
of dimensionality determined by the frightening “trinity”: complex body + com-
plex brain + complex (partly unknown) environment. The idea is to organize the
computational process in a local to global manner, grounding it on emerging studies
in different areas of neuroscience, while keeping in mind that motor cognition and
motor control are inseparable twins, linked through a common body/body schema.
The long-term goal is to make a humanoid robot like iCub capable of “cumulative
learning.” A humanoid robot should mirror both the complexity of the human form
and the brain that drives it to exhibit equally complex and often creative behaviors!
This requires to emulate the gradual process of infant “cognitive development”
in order to investigate the underlying interplay among multiple sensory, motor,
and cognitive processes in the framework of an integrated system: a coherent,