Abstract
One of the most impressive feats in robotics was the 2005 victory by a driverless Volkswagen Touareg in the DARPA Grand Challenge. This paper discusses what can be learned about the nature of representation from the car’s successful attempt to navigate the world. We review the hardware and software that it uses to interact with its environment, and describe how these techniques enable it to represent the world. We discuss robosemantics, the meaning of computational structures in robots. We argue that the car constitutes a refutation of semantic arguments against the possibility of strong artificial intelligence.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Chris Eliasmith and Abninder Litt for comments on an earlier version, and to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for funding. Thanks to Sebastian Thrun for information about Stanley, and to Paul Rybsky and Drew Bagnell for information about the 2007 Urban Challenge winner from Carnegie Mellon.
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Parisien, C., Thagard, P. Robosemantics: How Stanley the Volkswagen Represents the World. Minds & Machines 18, 169–178 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-008-9098-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-008-9098-2