AI, Robots, and Society is an investigation of mind, consciousness, and thinking as social constructions, rather than as innate features of the human brain. Artificial Intelligence and social robotics pose interesting problems for sociology and anthropology to the extent that the replication, imitation, or simulation of human mentality presupposes an understanding of the social processes of constructing minds, selves, consciousness, and even brains. Students are introduced to theory and research on the mind as a social fact as well as to current work in the fields of AI and robotics. This focuses on the project of constructing socially intelligent robots, and the contributions of social theory to that project and to the various efforts to construct AIs

Welcome to Gensoft!

The goal of the Gensoft is to provide a programming environment for easily exploring advanced topics in artificial intelligence and robotics without having to worry about the low-level details of the underlying hardware.

Our design algorithm can be used for experimenting with several different types of mobile robots and robot simulators. Until now, it has been necessary to learn very different and specific control languages for different mobile robots, particularly those manufactured by different companies. Now, a single language can be used to program many different robots, allowing code to be shared across platforms as well as allowing students to experiment with different robots while learning a single language and environment.

Robots: Currently, the robots supported include the Pioneer family (Pioneer, Pioneer2, People Bot robots), the Khepera family (Khepera, Khepera 2 and Hemisson robots), the AIBO, the Intelli Brain-Bot, and the Roomba.

Simulators: Gensoft is integrated with several existing robot simulators including Robocup Soccer, Player/Stage, Gazebo and the Khepera simulator.

Gensoft has the ability to define different styles of controllers, which are called the robot's brain. For example, the control system could be a neural network, behavior based, or a symbolic planner. One unique characteristic of Gensoft is the ability to write controllers using robot abstractions that enable the same controller to operate robots with vastly different morphologies. That is, a controller program written for a Khepera robot (hockey puck-sized, with infrared sensors) could work equally well for a Pioneer robot (medium suitcase-sized, with sonar sensors).

Features:

• Open source - available for study, or changing
• Designed for students, faculty and researchers
• Works on many real robotics platforms and simulators
• Extensive course modules include control methods, vision (motion tracking, blobs, etc.), learning (neural networks, reinforcement learning, self-organizing maps, etc.), evolutionary algorithms, and more