Building artificial minds
El equipo ASLab se ha presentado al concurso UPM_innovatech 2T Challenge obteniendo el 1er Premio.
Esta es una iniciativa de desafío competitivo para investigadores, pionera en España, que busca reconocer y premiar las tecnologías más innovadoras de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid y contribuir a su desarrollo y comercialización.
La tecnología presentada por ASLab, InTelos, es el resultado de años de investigación en sistemas auto-conscientes.
In a sense, full autonomy seems to be the central objective of any automatic control systems research program. But, for different reasons, it is not. Let’s analise some of the reasons for this apparent paradox.
First, nobody in charge of real production systems want the plants to be fully autonomous because of trust. Not just due to the perceivable higher robustness of human behavior but because in general full autonomy would mean that the systems were not complying with our own objectives but with theirs (i.e. of the plant, not of the owner). This is, in fact, a big difference between research programs that focus on pure biomimicry, e.g. animatronics or artificial life, and research programs that focus on pure economical value, e.g. process control
or vetronics. This last —economic operation— is our case; so, in a sense, what we want as engineers is not full autonomy but bounded autonomy, i.e. we want to be able to make the system being autonomous up to the level where this autonomy may impinge on the system ceasing to comply to some constraints imposed by us, their masters.
Second, no automation engineer tries to build a fully autonomous plant because in the general case of having plant-environmental uncertainty, that is a daunting, not-yet-clear-how-to-do task. There are indeed too many issues to take into account and less than perfect knowledge on how to achieve them. This implies that some levels of autonomy may be not easy to reach not only technically but economically (i.e. the effort needed to achieve them is not justified by its value).
So what we really want as automation engineers is just \emph{bounded} and made-to-fit autonomy, i.e. we strive to having the (control) knowledge, the (software) technology and the (engineering) process necessary for making the system autonomous up to the level where i) this autonomy may make the system violate some constraints imposed by design; and ii) this level of autonomy does not cost too much to achieve.
Real considerations notwithstanding, generally speaking, and from a systems researcher point of view, there is still no clear way on how to achieve full autonomy or how to progres in this made-to-fit autonomy way. Humans seem to be the most autonomous entities we know about (thanks to their reasoning, learning and creativity capabilities) and that is the reason for bioinspired approaches. No matter how poetic or sensible this may sound, we have no definitive clues on how to leverage our limited knowledge of these humanly capabilities.
The Autonomous Systems Laboratory is a research group focused on the production of science and technology for the engineering of robust autonomy.
Autonomy is a technical property of systems that make them capable of sustained provision of a particular service even in the presence of major uncertainties and disturbances in the service demand, the context of service execution and the internal alterations that the system itself may be suffering.
We acknowledge that the road is very long in front of us and that it will take a lot of time until we reach an ultimate solution to the problem of building artificial robust autonomous systems. However, we expect to achieve some intermediate results that may be operational for the engineering of useful systems in many domains in a short timescale.
While we center our application focus in a reduced set of domains, we pursue theoretical and engineering results of horizontal applicability in a broad domain of technical systems: from process control to robotics, from embedded devices to internet services. Any domain can profit from results in robust autonomy.
ASLab, while focusing in the long term objective of science and technology for universal autonomy, has some more focused research lines around specific topics: