Institutional Robotics
Abstract
Pioneer approaches to Artificial Intelligence have traditionally
neglected, in a chronological sequence, the agent body, the world
where the agent is situated, and the other agents. With the advent of
Collective Robotics approaches, important progresses were made toward
embodying and situating the agents, together with the introduction of
collective intelligence. However, the currently used models of social environments are still rather poor, jeopardizing the attempts of developing
truly intelligent robot teams. In this paper, we propose a roadmap for
a new approach to the design of multi-robot systems, mainly inspired
by concepts from Institutional Economics, an alternative to mainstream
neoclassical economic theory. Our approach intends to sophisticate the
design of robot collectives by adding, to the currently popular emergentist
view, the concepts of physically and socially bounded autonomy of
cognitive agents, uncoupled interaction among them and deliberately set
up coordination devices.