Abstract
In the 1990’s, Robotics began to design a new robot aimed at industries (primarily automotive) that worked and interacted with humans outside the cage, thereby replacing traditional robots for some specific duties. This robot is therefore called co-bot (collaborative and robot). Also in the 1990’s, Robotics designed the social robot (for which we propose the neologism so-bot), aimed at assisting humans and keeping them company. The sociality of the sobots lies in their ability to follow the rules of human social life, make decisions independently, and respect the roles assigned to them. Scientific literature usually keeps the terms collaborative and social robot distinct as if they indicated different and separate concepts. We question this separation and affirm that to collaborate (from the Latin cum-laboro) means to interact with someone while respecting their nature. Collaboration is that particular form of sociality that relates to work activity. From this it follows that the cobot is essentially social and that cobots and sobots belong to the same category that we call co-s-bots (collaborative social robots). In other words, cobots and sobots are two types of cosbots, as the flea and the elephant are two types of animals. The difference between cobot and sobot is given by the development of AI. Both are potentially social, that is, potentially capable of interacting and making decisions independently; but while the cobot is social in potency, the sobot is social ‘in act’. With Aristotelian terminology we can therefore say that the cobot is a sobot in power, while the sobot is a cobot in act. We call this new concept ‘cobot ontology’. Such an ontology makes it possible to classify cobots according to the degree of development of AI, just as living beings are classified according to the level of intelligence developed.To teach the cosbot to interact with humans, engineers use some results of neuroscientific research such as mirror neurons and the embodied Mind. The use of these models should encourage machine self-learning. Self-learning means autonomy, and autonomy needs strong AI development. It is becoming increasingly clear that autonomy is the condition of the sociality of the sobot. The article thus concludes that the relationship between cobot and sobot is the identification of a more general robot-automaton (rabota-automatos) relationship which, in the writer’s opinion, is the essential basis and driving force behind the entire history of Robotics.
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Notes
In 2018, Østergaard won the Engelberger Prize (a kind of Nobel Prize for Robotics named after the physicist and engineer who introduced the first industrial robot, the Unimate, to General Motors in 1959).
These are amongst the main reasons for injuries and musculoskeletal disorders (Peternel, L., Tsagarakis, N., Caldwell, D., Ajoudani, A., 2018).
Mirror neurons are motor neurons, that were discovered between 1980 and 1990 by a group of researchers at the University of Parma coordinated by Giacomo Rizzolatti (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006). They have been directly observed in humans (Pascolo & Budai 2008), primates and birds. These neurons were thought to be activated only for motor functions. However, it has been seen that they are also activated when another person acts and performs an action that mirrors the same action that the subject has performed (Iacoboni, 2008; Zaboura, 2009). This is why they are called ‘mirror’. It is worth mentioning here that one of the researchers on Rizzolatti's team, Vittorio Gallese, was confronted with the great phenomenological tradition dating back to Edmund Husserl and his pupil Edith Stein.
However, this subject is still controversial in some aspects. Recent studies have shown that the software of RMI, which allowed for observing mirrors, overestimate the representation of brain activity. In any case, the main role of these neurons is to understand the actions of others.
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Cusano, N. Cobot and Sobot: For a new Ontology of Collaborative and Social Robots. Found Sci 28, 1143–1155 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-022-09860-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-022-09860-2