ITALK: Integration and Transfer of Action and Language Knowledge in Robots

The ITALK project aims to develop artificial embodied agents able to acquire complex behavioural, cognitive, and linguistic skills through individual and social learning. This will be achieved through the development of cognitive robotic agents, such as the iCub humanoid platform, that learn to handle and manipulate objects and tools autonomously, to cooperate and communicate with other robots and humans, and to adapt their abilities to changing internal, environmental, and social conditions.

The main theoretical hypothesis behind the project is that the parallel development of action, conceptualisation and social interaction permits the bootstrapping of language capabilities, which on their part enhance cognitive development. This is possible through the integration and transfer of knowledge and cognitive processes involved in sensorimotor learning and the construction of action categories, imitation and other forms of social learning, the acquisition of grounded conceptual representations and the development of the grammatical structure of language.

The project will lead to the development of: (a) new theoretical insights, models and scientific explanations of the integration of action, social and linguistic skills and in particular on the hypothesis that action, social and linguistic knowledge co-develop and further bootstrap cognitive development, (b) new interdisciplinary sets of methods for analysing the interaction of language, action and cognition in humans and artificial cognitive agents, (c) new cognitively-plausible engineering principles and approaches for the design of robots with behavioural, cognitive, social and linguistic skills.

Overall, the project proposes visionary research that will provide a new standard in embodied cognitive science and will demonstrate the effectiveness of the method proposed by integrating interdisciplinary theoretical and experimental research on a single advanced robotic platform.