E. Diamant
DARPA’s News Releases) “to create adaptable, integrated intelligence systems aimed to augment intelligence
analysts’ capabilities to support time-sensitive operations on the battlefield” [11]. And in another document –
“The objectives (of DARPA’s programs) are not to replace human analysts, but to make them more effective
and efficient by reducing their cognitive load and enabling them to search for activities and threats quickly and
easily” [12].
Objectives of Challenge 2 programs in the EU research initiative have been far more ambitious—The FP6
Workprogramme for years 2003-2004 states: (The objective is) “to construct physically instantiated or embodied
systems that can perceive, understand (the semantics of information conveyed through their perceptual input)
and interact with their environment, and evolve in order to achieve human-like performance in activities requir-
ing context-(situation and task) specific knowledge, etc. The development of cognitive robots whose “purpose in
life” would be to serve humans as assistants or “companions”. Such robots would be able to learn new skills and
tasks in an active open-ended way and to grow in constant interaction and co-operation with humans” [4].
These objectives (almost in similar words) are repeatedly declared in all further Work programmes. For ex-
ample, the 2011-2012 Workprogramme says that in these words: “Challenge 2 focuses on artificial cognitive
systems and robots that operate in dynamic, nondeterministic, real-life environments… Actions under this C ha l-
lenge support research on engineering robotic systems and on endowing artificial systems with cognitive capa-
bilities” [8].
Careful examination of the outcome that results from both the DARPA’s programs and from the FP5-FP7 ob-
jectives leads to a univocal conclusion—the announced goals of all these programs have never been reached!
The explanation of this phenomenon is very simple—people try to provide robots with human-like cognitive
abilities, but at the same time the same people are devoid of even a slightest understanding about what does the
notion of “human-like cognitive abilities” really mean.
During the past years, the problem has become obvious and has been even mentioned in the 2011-2012
Workprogramme: “Hard scientific and technological research issues still need to be tackled in order to make
robots fit for rendering high-quality services, or for flexible manufacturing scenarios. Sound theories are requi-
site to underpinning the development of robotic systems and providing pertinent design paradigms, also in-
formed by studies of natural cognitive systems (as in the neuro- and behavioural sciences) [8].
Even more definite was the statement of the year 2013 Work programme—“An additional research focus tar-
geted under this challenge will address symbiotic human-machine relations, which aims at a deeper understand-
ing of human behaviour during interaction with ICT, going beyond conventional approaches. The work on cog-
nitive systems and smart spaces and on symbiotic human-machine relations is not restricted to robotics” [13].
This promise was also left unfulfilled. At the end of 2013, Cognitive Robotics research has moved to and has
tightened itself with the human brain research activities.
4. New Hopes
At the beginning of year 2014, both Europe and USA will launch ambitious programmes for human brain re-
search. In the USA, the programme is called the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnolo-
gies (BRAIN) Initiative and it was announced by President Barack Obama on April 2013. Its accomplishment
will be led by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), DARPA, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) [14].
In Europe, the Human Brain Project is a ten-year project, consisting of a thirty-month ramp-up phase, funded
under FP7, with support from a special flagship ERANET, and a ninety-month operational phase, to be funded
under Horizon 2020 programme. The project, which will have a total budget of over 1 billion Euros, is Euro-
pean-led with a strong element of international cooperation. The goal of the project is to build a completely new
ICT infrastructure for neuroscience, and for brain-related research in medicine and computing, catalysing a
global collaborative effort to understand the human brain and its diseases and ultimately to emulate its comput a-
tional capabilities [15].
The main features of the two projects are collected in the Table 5.
As it follows from the Table 5, Cognitive Robotics is not among the main goals of the two Flagship initia-
tives, but it is definitely among their main purposes. In the European Human Brain Project it appears as the
“Cognitive Architectures” line in the list of the HBP topics. In the American BRAIN Project Cognitive Robotics
issues are hidden behind the “Link neuronal activity to behaviour” topic.