Dr Tony Belpaeme has been awarded £165,000 by the EPSRC to study how robots can learn concepts from humans, and how that knowledge can be passed on to other robots.

Researchers at the University of Plymouth, are to build two robots that will learn the meanings of words through interacting with people, much in the same way that young children learn conceptual knowledge from hearing adults speak to them about objects, relations and actions.

It takes children three years to master a few hundred words and related concepts – the duration of this project, however, the researchers hope to speed up this process of word-concept learning by using training more than one robot, and so reducing the training time needed, and then downloading the missing knowledge from one robot to the other. Such ‘telepathic’ access to concepts is impossible for humans: we need to resort to pointing out examples of concepts and speaking about them, but direct transfer should be easy to arrange for robots. However, just copying information from one robot to another will almost certainly upset the conceptual knowledge already present in the receiving robot. To avoid this, direct transfer of conceptual knowledge needs to proceed with care in order to not disturb already present knowledge.

The project has two main aims.

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