Time is ever present in our lives, from the beat of the heart to our ability to set appointments with friends, recall the temporal aspects of past events, and make plans for the future. Hence, it is clear that, if we are to implement intelligent artificial systems that act and communicate in human terms, these systems must be capable of experiencing and processing time in a way similar to humans. This establishes the five research objectives of TimeStorm, as follows:
- Reveal the temporal aspects of the self and conspecifics, and describe an implementation framework for robots that perceive the flow of time.
- Adopt a joint developmental, neuroimaging investigation of the human brain to decipher the circuits and neurofunctional processes involved in temporal cognition and perception.
- Implement a new generation of artificial cognitive systems that realize diverse aspects of time perception and their links to ordinary cognitive skills.
- Embody cognitive systems in humanoid robots and enable the latter to exploit sense of time in order to effectively engage in symbiotic human-robot interaction situations.
- Provide added value on the neuro-behavioral and computational studies by jointly considering the obtained multidisciplinary results.
The achievement of TimeStorm goals will be demonstrated in the context of assistive human-robot interaction, in a setup that assumes the synergetic preparation of a dinner, accomplishing advanced robotic capacities in terms of knowing, doing, and being.