Paper ID: 2402.09030

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

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.

Submitted: Feb 14, 2024