Sensorimotor Domain Approach for Artificial Autonomous Cognitive Development

The autonomous cognitive development paradigm applied to cognitive agent’s design assumes that no prior knowledge should be embedded while the agent’s cognitive system is conceived. The use of this paradigm is an attempt to avoid the symbol grounding problem faced by some cognitive agent designs. We assume that the cognitive system of a sensorimotor agent is not aware of what it’s sensors sense or what it’s actuators do, or even where they are connected to in the agent’s body. Using these prerogatives we present a sensorimotor domain approach that can be used to build agent’s controls and to construct agents’ cognitive systems. This proposal is then compared to an approach for sensorimotor control system implementation, here called sensorimotor functional approach, under the perspective of the autonomous cognitive development paradigm. In order to highlight the advantages of our proposal and to show how it can bypass the limitations of the functional approach, two simple examples are presented.