Toddlerbot
From our earliest infancy, when we recognise the sound of our parents’ voices it seems we are programmed for speech. Now a consortium of scientists led by Professor Angelo Cangelosi is teaching a ‘child-behaving’ robot to speak, using the same processes that a child uses to acquire language.

Based at the University of Plymouth, Professor Cangelosi devised the ITALK project based on his previous work of teaching virtual agents in a computer program to talk to each other. ‘We were working towards using real robots and towards modelling the learning of language in children. We know the process that happens in children and the different stages of language acquisition. My approach is bio-inspired, we look at what happens in nature to build robots and intelligent systems.’  

International experts
Professor Cangelosi has brought together a team of experts, including robotocists at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, who have developed the first baby robot called iCub. ‘We will create a series of tasks for the robot,’ says Cangelosi, ’which are the same sort of tasks that children experience using toys. The main task will be the robot sitting at a table, using hands to play with toys and grasp objects. Like children, they can stack cubes on top of each other, the biggest at the bottom, gradually working up. This is what children do. They are playing and gradually learning. Our robot will be trained to perform these motor actions like a young child does and we will be teaching the robot the names of actions, the names of objects, colours and so on. Just like being in pre-school.’

Main challenges
Cangelosi believes the main challenge is scalability. ‘Can we increase the complexity of the action sets, such that they resemble the actions that children do? Can the robot learn and handle all these names and get to a stage, as children do, where they start to combine individual words together to make phrases and sentences? The big challenge is that at the end of the four years we want to demonstrate that a robot of this type can actually communicate with humans about what they have learned.’

The ITALK project research and findings will be available for other researchers to use in different robotic platforms. And Cangelosi agrees that like every young child, iCub will have a name and a personality.