Within the series of colloquia organized by the FP7 project ACROSS, an international research advisor of the ACROSS project, Prof. Nikos Tsourveloudis, who is a professor of manufacturing technology at the Technical University of Crete (TUC), Chania, Greece, where he leads the Intelligent Systems and Robotics Laboratory (www.robolab.tuc.gr) and the Machine Tools Laboratory, held a very interesting lecture about the ability of living organisms to successfully cope and provide good solutions to almost all robotics-related problems.
The research that was presented in his talk was a continuation of previous research on the navigation and control of autonomous robots. The objective was to present, define and discuss the required level of cognitive capabilities needed for robotic navigation and coordination purposes. Emphasis was given to the fact that humans and animals make inferences about unknown features of their world under constraints of limited time, limited knowledge, and limited computational capacities. And despite their cognitive limitations (bounded rationality) they tend to build and use domain specific heuristics that allow for fast “problem solving” (and task specific successful behaviors). The following discussion raised questions such as how robotics can benefit from these facts.