This book focuses on the research and development in the field of self-aware robots. Its theme is artificial consciousness, a field that covers both artificial intelligence and robotics, and includes philosophy, psychology, the study of biological evolution, physiology, and medicine, especially brain neuroscience and neuropsychiatry. Building on the first edition, Creation of a Conscious Robot: Mirror Image Cognition and Self-Awareness, this new edition discusses artificial neural networks and functions of human consciousness. It proposes a structure for a neural network with consciousness functions, explains the construction of a conscious system, and discusses the results of progressive research in designing and developing small robots with conscious systems capable of recognizing their own images in mirrors. Emphasizing the contributions of conscious robots to society and their potential future impact, the book also describes the robots that know the unknown, Pavlovian robots, and the development of a consciousness model possessing the well-known multiple personality disorder.
1. Introduction
2. StoryofRobots
3. Story of the Human Brain
4. Human Consciousness and the Mind
5. Professor Valentino Braitenberg’s Vehicles
6. Professor Rodney Brooks’ Robots
7. Artificial Neural Networks and Machine Evolution
8. Machine Consciousness
9. New Architecture of Robot Consciousness and the Robot Mind
10. Physical Demonstration of Successful Mirror Image Cognition by a Robot
11. Further Developments
12. Conclusions
Biography
Junichi Takeno received his doctorate in engineering in 1979 from Meiji University, Japan, where he was a professor in the Department of Computer Science until March 2021. He is currently the president of Heuristics Science Research Institute, Japan. In 1994, he was a guest professor at Karlsruhe University, Germany. Prof. Takeno specializes in intelligent robotics, autonomous mobile robots, humanoid robots, artificial intelligence, artificial consciousness, and the robot’s vision, facial expressions, emotions and feelings, self-awareness and mind. International Program Committee member of the Computer Science and Information Technologies in Russia, founding member and program committee member of the Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA) USA, editorial board member of the International Journal of the Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ) and BICA Journal, an RSJ trustee, and editing committee chair of Advanced Robotics. He is also a member of the Permanent Commission for the History of Mechanism and Machine Science of the International Federation for the Promotion of Mechanism and Machine Science (IFToMM).
