Dispersed Robots and Intelligent Environments: A Philosophical Perspective

IntroductionAccording to folk theories of the mind, there is a clear separation between mind and matter.There are entities in the world such as minds that think and represent, and entities such as rocks and tables that do neither.In contrast to rocks and tables, the mind can use information from the senses to generate a repre sen ta tion of the world, and in contrast to rocks and tables, it can consult this repre sen ta tion to issue a set of actions that will help it reach certain goals.Metaphorically, the mind is not unlike a pilot: It is the pilot who is in charge of the vessel, and it is the pilot's information and goals that determine how the vessel behaves.The traditional view of robots in AI is largely based on this simple picture of the human mind: The mind of the robot-think the CPU-builds an internal repre sen ta tion of the environment it inhabits, and if the robot's repre sen ta tion is accurate, the robot can successfully base its actions on this repre sen ta tion to reach its goals.Let us call this picture of robots Cartesian.The central challenge for a Cartesian-inspired approach to robotics involves bridging the gap between repre sen ta tion and world: Only by ensuring that a robot's repre sen ta tion of the world is accurate can we guarantee that its actions are successful.Yet, it can be a troublesome affair to build robots that manage to bridge the Cartesian gap.The computational burdens on robots that need to maintain and upkeep an accurate repre sen ta tion of the world can be hefty.Sometimes the environment changes rapidly so that new computations must continually be performed to keep the repre sen ta tion of the environment updated, and sometimes the environment is so complex that even a repre sen ta tion of a static environment becomes computationally unmanageable.In such environments, the risk is that robots will freeze under the computational load-as it would often happen to traditional Shakey-like systems-and act so impractically that they will hardly qualify as acting at all.