The Construction of Reality in a Cognitive System

Getting an embodied cognitive system to form a mental model of its world is a challenging prospect. Most AI systems leverage domains defined entirely by the system designers—initial objects, relations, operations, and even search control knowledge are often pre-specified. Building autonomous systems that can bootstrap themselves using a minimal domain definition is a critical research objective of Developmental AI. PAM-P2, a domain agnostic cognitive system, builds a world model using an initial set of user specified primitive actions and homeostatic needs. As sensory datasets are received, an ontology is formed and used to derive situations, events, episodes, solutions, problems, and predictions. An overview of the PAM-P2 architecture and knowledge representation is presented.