Robosemantics: How Stanley the Volkswagen Represents the World

  • Authors:
  • Christopher Parisien;Paul Thagard

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada M5S 3G4;Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada N2L 3G1

  • Venue:
  • Minds and Machines
  • Year:
  • 2008

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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.