Cui bono robo sapiens?

Ever since Czech writer Karel Capek's well-known play " R.U.R. – Rossum's universal robots " [Capek], first published in 1920 and performed in 1921, man-made robots of human-like shape have inspired fiction writers to envision worlds with artificial creatures far superior to human beings – either in friendly coexistence or taking over by eliminating their creators and leaving them behind as an ephemeral step in the evolution of life on earth. Roboticists and AI researchers, by contrast, have come to realise that there is still a long way to go if only parts of such visions are to come true. Almost every aspect of research on humanoid robotics that has been touched on across scientific communities has taken researchers to the edge of current technology. Moreover, it has also become obvious how limited our knowledge about ourselves is when it comes to implanting those skills into a mechanical body that are necessary to enable a robot to mimic basic aspects of human intelligence. However, due to recent developments in enabling technologies [Brooks] (processing power, mechatronics, walking machines, articulated vision heads and more) and also due to findings and developments in other fields (e.g. studies of the human brain, linguistics, psychology), we currently observe a shift in the view of what artificial intelligence is and how it can be put to work in operational autonomous systems. This sets the stage for putting perceptive, cognitive, communicative and manipulatory abilities together to create truly autonomous humanoid robots. Undoubtedly, there are good reasons for embarking on this demanding research journey: there is no platform other than the adult-sized humanoid that is better suited to study many details of our own " being there " in a dynamically changing man-made environment, e.g. through experimentally validating Maturana's understanding [Maturana] of enactive cognition through structural coupling both with the environment (i.e. our semi-structured world), with other humanoids and with (a society of) humans. Hence there is also no better platform to study all the different aspects of artificial embodied minds and their development through the interplay of evolving cognitive and motor skills. Most importantly, multidisciplinary research focusing on real autonomy for humanoids, i.e. their capacity to establish and maintain their own identity through self-control and self-guidance, may pave the way to robot systems (not necessarily of human shape) that not only adapt to dynamically changing environments (such as insect-level agents) but also to situations in their interactive …