8:11 a.m., March 5, 2010----Herbert Tanner, assistant professor in the University of Delaware's Department of Mechanical Engineering, will speak on the topic “Teaching Social Skills to Robots” at 6 p.m., Thursday, March 11, in the Center for Composite Materials at the corner of East Delaware Avenue and Academy Street in Newark.

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The presentation is part of the Internal Cognitive Science Colloquium Series sponsored by the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science.

Tanner's talk will be about a new approach to planning cooperative robot behavior, using tools from formal languages. “There appears to be a parallel between single and/or multiple robot task and action interdependencies, and speech planning or articulatory phonetics,” Tanner said. “Planning and control synthesis for robots has recently been studied within the context of logics and formal languages, and model checking tools have been brought in to automatically design control strategies which are 'correct-by-design,' in the sense that they are built to satisfy some given system specifications.

“One of the main challenges here is complexity: state-space explosion. Our hypothesis is that by transferring and adapting linguistic models and language learners into the field of robot planning and control, we can anticipate benefits both computational and analytical. In this talk we review some preliminary work along this direction, and outline a plan for addressing some of the technical challenges, focusing on a particular (subregular) class of robot behaviors (languages), and utilizing learning algorithms within this class to create abstractions and models for robot planning and control.”

In 2009, Tanner was awarded a $450,000 National Science Foundation grant to develop a framework for a robotic sensor network that can autonomously search for, detect, and identify patterns in large volumes of sensor data.