Speaker: Thomas Bolander and Lasse Dissing
Date and Time: Thursday, June 25th 2020, 16:30-18:00, Amsterdam time.
Venue: online.
Title: Implementing Theory of Mind on a Robot Using Dynamic Epistemic Logic
Abstract.
Previous research has claimed dynamic epistemic logic (DEL) to be a suitable formalism for representing essential aspects of a Theory of Mind (ToM) for autonomous agents. This includes the ability of the formalism to represent the reasoning involved in false-belief tasks of arbitrary order, and hence for autonomous agents based on the formalism to become able to pass such tests. We provide evidence for the claims by presenting the implementation of a DEL-based reasoning system on a humanoid robot (the Pepper robot by Softbank Robotics). Our implementation allows the robot to perform cognitive perspective-taking, in particular to reason about the first- and higher-order beliefs of other agents. We demonstrate how this allows the robot to pass a quite general class of false-belief tasks involving human agents. Additionally, it allows the robot to proactively provide human agents with relevant information in situations where a system without ToM-abilities would fail. The symbolic grounding problem of turning robotic sensor input into logical action descriptions in DEL is achieved via a perception system based on deep neural networks.