Time in robot cognition: an emerging research branch

Abstract

The long-term goal of robotic research is the implementation of intelligent and social artifi cial agents capable of interacting in human terms. Besides the signifi cant progress in the fi eld during the last decades, even state of the art robots exhibit poor social competencies when compared to humans or animals. An important reason for that is the lacking ability of robots to experience the fl ow of time, which in turn prevents artifi cial agents from suffi ciently considering time in their perceptual, behavioral, cognitive, emotional and communicative processes. Given that time is an important dimension of human-human daily interactions, any machine that aims to be seamlessly integrated into human environments is expected to have mature time processing abilities. Based on the above, we put forward temporal cognition as a vital capacity of intelligent and social artifacts. In the present paper we will provide examples of the current robots’ time processing insuffi ciency, we will discuss possible approaches for implementing artifi cial temporal cognition taking inspiration from the human time processing skills, and we will point out the signifi cant impact that this new research branch is expected to have in the future of robotic research.