Title:
Design and Implementation of a Hierarchical Robotic System: A Platform for Artificial Intelligence Investigation (Master's Thesis)

  by Juan C. Macera

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 Robots need to act in the real world, but they are constrained by weight, power, and
computation capability. Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques try to mimic the clever
processing of living creatures, but they lack embodiment and a realistic environment.
This thesis introduces a novel robotic architecture that provides slender robots with
massive processing and parallel computation potential. This platform allows the
investigation and development of AI models (the brain) in interaction with its body and
environment. Our robotic system distributes the processing on three biologically
correlated layers: the Body, Brainstem, and Cortex; on board the robot, on a local PC,
and on a remote parallel supercomputer, respectively. On each layer we have
implemented a series of intelligent functions with different computational complexity,
including a binaural sound localization technique, a bimodal speech recognition approach
using artificial neural networks, and the simulation of biologically realistic spiking neural
networks for bimodal speech perception.
Posted on:12 Dec 2003