Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

Awareness in robotics: An early perspective from the viewpoint of the EIC Pathfinder Challenge "Awareness Inside''

Cosimo Della Santina, Carlos Hernandez Corbato, Burak Sisman, Luis A. Leiva, Ioannis Arapakis, Michalis Vakalellis, Jean Vanderdonckt, Luis Fernando D'Haro, Guido Manzi, Cristina Becchio, Aïda Elamrani, Mohsen Alirezaei, Ginevra Castellano, Dimos V. Dimarogonas, Arabinda Ghosh, Sofie Haesaert, Sadegh Soudjani, Sybert Stroeve, Paul Verschure, Davide Bacciu, Ophelia Deroy, Bahador Bahrami, Claudio Gallicchio, Sabine Hauert, Ricardo Sanz, Pablo Lanillos, Giovanni Iacca, Stephan Sigg, Manel Gasulla, Luc Steels, Carles Sierra

TL;DR

The paper surveys eight projects funded under the EU EIC Pathfinder Challenge Awareness Inside to examine synthetic awareness from multiple perspectives and its relevance to robotics. It highlights the lack of a single, formal framework for awareness and compares diverse approaches, from attention-based consciousness to emergent collective awareness, across real-world use cases. The contributions include a cross-project synthesis of architectures, validation scenarios, and ethical considerations, illustrating potential pathways to more capable and trustworthy embodied systems. The work emphasizes the need for a common language and roadmap to accelerate disruptive innovations in autonomous and human–robot collaboration.

Abstract

Consciousness has been historically a heavily debated topic in engineering, science, and philosophy. On the contrary, awareness had less success in raising the interest of scholars in the past. However, things are changing as more and more researchers are getting interested in answering questions concerning what awareness is and how it can be artificially generated. The landscape is rapidly evolving, with multiple voices and interpretations of the concept being conceived and techniques being developed. The goal of this paper is to summarize and discuss the ones among these voices connected with projects funded by the EIC Pathfinder Challenge called ``Awareness Inside'', a nonrecurring call for proposals within Horizon Europe designed specifically for fostering research on natural and synthetic awareness. In this perspective, we dedicate special attention to challenges and promises of applying synthetic awareness in robotics, as the development of mature techniques in this new field is expected to have a special impact on generating more capable and trustworthy embodied systems.

Awareness in robotics: An early perspective from the viewpoint of the EIC Pathfinder Challenge "Awareness Inside''

TL;DR

The paper surveys eight projects funded under the EU EIC Pathfinder Challenge Awareness Inside to examine synthetic awareness from multiple perspectives and its relevance to robotics. It highlights the lack of a single, formal framework for awareness and compares diverse approaches, from attention-based consciousness to emergent collective awareness, across real-world use cases. The contributions include a cross-project synthesis of architectures, validation scenarios, and ethical considerations, illustrating potential pathways to more capable and trustworthy embodied systems. The work emphasizes the need for a common language and roadmap to accelerate disruptive innovations in autonomous and human–robot collaboration.

Abstract

Consciousness has been historically a heavily debated topic in engineering, science, and philosophy. On the contrary, awareness had less success in raising the interest of scholars in the past. However, things are changing as more and more researchers are getting interested in answering questions concerning what awareness is and how it can be artificially generated. The landscape is rapidly evolving, with multiple voices and interpretations of the concept being conceived and techniques being developed. The goal of this paper is to summarize and discuss the ones among these voices connected with projects funded by the EIC Pathfinder Challenge called ``Awareness Inside'', a nonrecurring call for proposals within Horizon Europe designed specifically for fostering research on natural and synthetic awareness. In this perspective, we dedicate special attention to challenges and promises of applying synthetic awareness in robotics, as the development of mature techniques in this new field is expected to have a special impact on generating more capable and trustworthy embodied systems.
Paper Structure (10 sections, 4 figures)

This paper contains 10 sections, 4 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. SYMBIOTIK: Context-aware adaptive visualizations for critical decision making
  3. ASTOUND: Improving social competences of virtual agents through artificial consciousness based on the Attention Schema Theory
  4. SymAware: Symbolic logic framework for situational awareness in mixed autonomy
  5. CAVAA: Counterfactual assessment and valuation for awareness architecture
  6. EMERGE: Emergent awareness from minimal collectives
  7. METATOOL: Robots inventing tools
  8. SUST(AI)N: Smart building sensitive to daily sentiment
  9. VALAWAI: Value-aware AI
  10. Discussion and Conclusions

Figures (4)

  • Figure 1: The architecture of an awareness-enabled MAS proposed in tanevska2023communicating as part of the project SymAware. The architecture provides insights into the internal structure of an awareness-enabled agent $i$, which interacts with another awareness-enabled agent $j$.
  • Figure 2: The project EMERGE deals with natural and artificial collaborative awareness, emerging from the interaction of bodies and brains of multiple heterogeneous agents. The figure showcases this idea in the context of swarms of soft robots, which are one of the targeted application domains for the activities of this project.
  • Figure 3: The artificial awareness generated by METATOOL will make robots able to use and invent tools, have self-awareness, and attain operationalizable abstraction.
  • Figure 4: The adaptive awareness that will be developed in SUST(AI)N combines local information across distributed nodes in an aware building scenario.