A Robot that is Self Aware?

Posted 22 Dec 2005 at 16:34 UTC by The Swirling Brain

The Discovery Channel website has an article where they claim that a robot is self aware! Although the robot is not at the level of human self-awareness, the researchers say the robot represents a big step toward developing self-aware robots and understanding and modeling human self-consciousness. The robot can look at an image of itself in a mirror and tell the difference between it or another robot that looks just like it. The robot has a blinking blue led that it blinks while it tries to figure out if it is itself or an imposter. Once it recognizes its own blinks then two green leds light otherwise two red leds light. Imagine Lucy looking at herself in a mirror or Lucy looking at Harpo in a mirror and trying to figure it out scenario. Its neural net only figures out about 70% of the time that it's itself. The researchers hope to get the robot to recognize itself 100% of the time. The article goes on to say that this groundbreaking technology could lead to robots that express emotion. The robot is under development by Junichi Takeno and a team of researchers at Meiji University in Japan.