The role of attention in robot self-awareness

A robot may not be truly self-aware even though it can have some characteristics of self-awareness, such as having emotional states or the ability to recognize itself in the mirror. We define self-awareness in robots to be characterized by the capacity to direct attention toward their own mental state. This paper explores robot self-awareness and the role that attention plays in the achievement self-awareness. We propose a new attention based approach to self-awareness called ASMO and conduct a comparative analysis of approaches that highlights the innovation and benefits of ASMO. We then describe how our attention based self-awareness can be designed and used to develop self-awareness in state-of-the-art humanoidal robots.