Breakthrough achievement! Our humanoid robot has successfully inferred Archimedes’ Principle through causal learning in an Aesop’s Fable-inspired experiment.
Research Achievement
Our work on causality and learning of physical law inferencing has been accepted in the prestigious Royal Society Interface. This represents a significant milestone in robot cognitive development and physical reasoning.
The Experiment
The study recreates the famous corvid experiments where birds learn to use water displacement to reach food rewards. Our iCub humanoid robot demonstrated the ability to:
- Learn causal relationships between actions and outcomes
- Infer underlying physical principles (Archimedes’ Principle)
- Apply learned knowledge to novel scenarios
- Display emergent understanding of water displacement physics
Impact and Significance
This work demonstrates how robots can develop intuitive physics understanding through experiential learning, mirroring cognitive processes observed in intelligent animals and human development.
The research bridges animal cognition studies with artificial intelligence, showing how embodied learning can lead to sophisticated causal reasoning in artificial agents.
Video demonstrations show the experiments on corvids that we recreated with iCub humanoid robot