
Birger JohanssonLund University | LU · Department of Philosophy
Birger Johansson
Doctor of Philosophy
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44
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273
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Publications
Publications (44)
Humans are expert percievers of behavioural properties, including the timing of movements. Even short hesitancies and delays can be salient depending on the context. This article presents results from a pilot study on time delays in a human-robot interaction setting using the Wizard of Oz paradigm. Participants (n=17) played Tic-Tac-Toe with the hu...
Perception is not a passive process but the result of an interaction between an organism and the environment. This is especially clear in haptic perception that depends entirely on tactile exploration of an object. We investigate this idea in a system-level brain model of somatosensory and motor cortex and show how it can use signals from a humanoi...
What can artificial intelligence learn from the cognitive sciences? We review some fundamental aspects of how human cognition works and relate it to different brain structures and their function. A central theme is that cognition is very different from how it is envisioned in classical artificial intelligence which offers a novel path toward intell...
In contrast to artificial systems, animals must forage for food. In biology, the availability of energy is typically both precarious and highly variable. Most importantly, the very structure of organisms is dependent on the continuous metabolism of nutrients into ATP, and its use in maintaining homeostasis. This means that energy is at the centre o...
We present data from two online human-robot interaction experiments where 227 participants viewed videos of a humanoid robot exhibiting faulty or non-faulty behaviours while either remaining mute or speaking. The participants were asked to evaluate their perception of the robot's trustworthiness, as well as its likeability, animacy, and perceived i...
Life-likeness is a property that can be used both to deceive people that a robot is more intelligent than it is or to facilitate the natural communication with humans. Over the years, different criteria have guided the design of intelligent systems, ranging from attempts to produce human-like language to trying to make a robot look like an actual h...
Organisms must cope with different risk/reward landscapes in their ecological niche. Hence, species have evolved behavior and cognitive processes to optimally balance approach and avoidance. Navigation through space, including taking detours, appears also to be an essential element of consciousness. Such processes allow organisms to negotiate preda...
Reinforcement learning systems usually assume that a value function is defined over all states (or state-action pairs) that can immediately give the value of a particular state or action. These values are used by a selection mechanism to decide which action to take. In contrast, when humans and animals make decisions, they collect evidence for diff...
We tested whether the observation of motor action encoding social motor intention would cause the spontaneous processing of a complementary response when performed by a humanoid robot. We designed the robot’s arm and upper body movements to manifest the kinematic profiles of human individual and social motor intention and designed a simple task tha...
Ikaros is an open framework for system-level brain modeling and real-time robot control. Version 2 of the system includes a range of computational components that implements various algorithms and methods ranging from models of neural circuits to control systems and hardware interfaces for robot. Ikaros supports the design and implementation of lar...
Epi is a humanoid robot developed by Lund University Cognitive Science Robotics Group. It was designed to be used in experiments in developmental robotics and has proportions to give a childlike impression while still being decidedly robotic. The robot head has two degrees of freedom in the neck and each eye can independently move laterally. There...
Autonomous machines are in the near future likely to increasingly interact with humans, and carry out their functions outside controlled settings. Both of these developments increase the requirements of machines to be trustworthy to humans. In this work, we argue that machines may also benefit from being able to explicitly build or withdraw trust w...
We conducted two experiments where subjects rated images of a robot head with different eye colors and light intensities on how well they communicate emotions like anger, enjoyment, and surprise, as well as personality traits like friendliness, intelligence, and level of trust. Results indicate e.g. that green and turquoise eye colors were more ass...
We introduce a memory model for robots that can account for many aspects of an inner world, ranging from object permanence, episodic memory, and planning to imagination and reveries. It is modeled after neurophysiological data and includes parts of the cerebral cortex together with models of arousal systems that are relevant for consciousness. The...
We explore to what degree movement together with facial features in a humanoid robot, such as eyes and mouth, can be used to convey mental states. Several animation variants were iteratively tested in a series of experiments to reach a set of five expressive states that can be reliably expressed by the robot. These expressions combine biologically...
This paper presents initial attempts to combine a humanoid robot with the teachable agent approach. Several design choices are discussed, including the decision to use a robot instead of a virtual agent and which behaviours to implement in the robot. A pilot study explored how the interaction with a robot seemed to influence children’s engagement a...
We present a system-level connectionist model of pupil control that includes brain regions believed to influence the size of the pupil. It includes parts of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system together with the hypothalamus, amygdala, locus coeruleus, and cerebellum. Computer simulations show that the model is able to reproduce a num...
We propose that moral behaviour of artificial agents could (and should) be intrinsically grounded in their own sensory-motor experiences. Such an ability depends critically on seven types of competencies. First, intrinsic morality should be grounded in the internal values of the robot arising from its physiology and embodiment. Second, the moral pr...
We argue that social robots should be designed to behave similarly to humans, and furthermore that social norms constitute the core of human interaction. Whether robots can be designed to behave in human-like ways turns on whether they can be designed to organize and coordinate their behavior with others' social expectations. We suggest that social...
The Builder Robot is a complete mobile robotics platform and includes an arm with a gripper and an active vision system. This report describes the steps to put together the robot from 3D printed files. Instructions are also included on how to assemble the electronic systems of the robot. The intention is that it should be possible to build the robo...
We investigating the role of anticipation and attention in a dynamic environment in a number of large scale simulations of
an agent that tries to negotiate a number of gates that continuously open and close. In particular we have looked at learning
mechanisms that can predict the future positions of the gates and control strategies that will allow...
The Ikaros project started in 2001 with the aim of developing an open infrastructure for system-level brain modeling. The system has developed into a general tool for cognitive modeling as well as robot control. Here we describe the main parts of the Ikaros system and how it has been used to implement various cognitive systems and to control a numb...
This book has provided various theoretical perspectives on anticipatory processes in natural and artificial cognitive systems. Advantages have been proposed and confirmed in various detailed case studies, which may have given the reader detailed insights into anticipatory processes and their importance in various cognitive systems tasks. To wrap up...
We investigated the role of the length of the future time interval in which an agent predicts what will happen. A number of
simulated robot experiments were performed where four thieves try to collect pieces of gold from a house that is guarded by
a single robot. The thieves try to anticipate the movement of the guard to select behaviors that will...
A model of event driven anticipatory learn-ing is described and applied to a number of attention situations where one or several vi-sual targets need to be tracked while being intermittently occluded. The model combines covert tracking of multiple targets with overt control of a single attention focus. The im-plemented system has been applied to bo...
Infants gradually learn to predict the motion of moving targets and change from a strategy that mainly depends on saccades to one that depends on anticipatory control of smooth pursuit. A model is described that combines three types of mechanisms for gaze control that develops in a way similar to infants. Initially, gaze control is purely reactive,...
During the years 2005 and 2006 a robot system has been developed at Lund University Cognitive Science to run navigation ex-periments in a dynamic environment. The main aim of the system is to study anticipation during navigation, model building, color tracking, navigation algorithms, social robotics and children's games. This techni-cal report desc...
This report describes a fast method for finding regions with a particular color in a visual scene. The method is general enough to be used in any situations were a number of objects with known color need to be found in an image. We demon- strate how the algorithm can be used to find and track robots wi th colored markers, symbols with a particular...
The Ikaros project started in 2001 with the aim at de- veloping an open infrastructure for system-level brain modeling. The system has developed into a general tool for cognitive modeling as well as robot control. This report describes the main parts of the Ikaros system, in particular the simulation kernel, and sum- marizes the work done within th...
This paper presents an experimental study using two robots. In the experiment, the robots navigated through an area with or without obstacles and had as their goal to shift places with each other. Four dif- ferent approaches (random, reactive, planning, anticipation) were used during the experiment and the times to accomplish the task were com- par...
This paper presents an experimental study using two robots. In the experiment, the robots navigated through an area with or without obstacles and had as their goal to shift places with each other. Four dif-ferent approaches (random, reactive, planning, anticipation) were used during the experiment and the times to accomplish the task were com-pered...
To accurately track a moving target despite delays in the visual processing, it is necessary to predict how the target will move in the future and to direct the gaze toward the anticipated location. We have ad-dressed this problem within a simulated visual scene were a ball is dropped from a random location and subsequently bounces or rolls on diff...
A model of gaze control is describes that includes mechanisms for predictive control using a forward model and event driven expectations of target behavior. The model roughly undergoes stages similar to those of human infants if the influence of the predictive systems is gradually increased.
Although attention can be purely reactive, like when we react to an unexpected event, in most cases, attention is under deliberate
control anticipating events in the world. Directing attention and preparing for action takes time, and it is thus useful to
be able to predict where an important event will occur in the environment and direct attention...
We describe a number of research projects at Lund Univer- sity Cognitive Science. The first project focuses on visual attention. The second area is haptic perceptions by robots. The third area is anticipation in groups of robots. The final research area concerns building computa- tional tools that can be used to design large-scale cognitive models...
This paper describes an implementation of the occu-pancy grid algorithm, one of the most popular algo-rithms for robotic mapping. The algorithm is imple-mented on a robot setup at Lund University Cogni-tive Science (LUCS), and a number of experiments are conducted where the algorithm is exposed to different kinds of noise. The outcome show that the...