New Approaches in Cognitive Robotics

This issue presents a set of contributions showing recent evolutions of researches within the so-called “Cognitive Robotics” field. This term refers to any scientific research aiming at having a robot realize a task which is considered, when performed by humans, to involve cognitive functions. The latters can be (without being exhaustive) learning, social interaction, perception, motricity, spatial cognition, reasoning, language, or awareness. The goal of this issue is to show how the specific objectives and methods of this research field have historically and progressively stepped away from other work in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, in order to get closer to other disciplines within the field of Cognitive Sciences. As a corollary, the issue aims at making explicit some identified bridges that could enable these various disciplines to cross-fertilize. In particular, one of the objectives of this issue is to illustrate how robotics experimentation can serve as platforms to test hypotheses from other disciplines of Cognitive Sciences, and thus contribute to the study of biological cognition.