The Holy Grail of robotics development is a robot with general-purpose capabilities and intelligence. We feel we can achieve that based upon our radical understanding of the nature of behaviour, and its application to robotics. Our radical concept of Perceptual Control represents a significant challenge to the conventional way of thinking. It synergises perception, action, motivation and the environment into a single dynamic component of a multi-leveled, hierarchical system.
Our objective, is to demonstrate this bio-inspired technology in a proof of concept by developing a series of increasingly sophisticated robot systems, with the end goal of a dynamic and active autonomous humanoid robot.
In this project we will explore and test our approach to lay the foundations of a new future technology by establishing a leading European research and innovation capacity based upon interdisciplinary collaborations to develop radically new perspectives on psychology, robotics, learning and visual perception. We believe these will form a unified theory of behaviour and intelligence leading to ‘living’ robots well beyond the state of the art.
The development of such robots has significant, concrete technological implications for new applications that have the potential to have enormous social and economic impact on many areas of our lives, bringing the benefits promised by the hype of robotics that have so far been unrealised.
For this purpose we have brought together a pan-European consortium of experts comprising the University of Manchester (UK), Cyberbotics (Switzerland), Irida Labs (Greece), GII University da Coruna (Spain), Quasar Science Resources (Spain), BOC (Austria), JuMelia (UK), RoTechnology (Italy), Feuga (Spain), University of Coventry (Spain) and Perceptual Robots (UK).