MEC Conscious Cognitive Control Project

The C3 project tries to develop technology for model-based construction of reflective, model-based controllers. This project is funded by the spanish Ministry of Education.

Get more details in the C3 Project Website.

Modern trends in controller architectures for autonomous systems (robots, industrial plants, webbots, etc.) are progressively focused in explicit formulations of high-level human cognitive capabilities. Among them we consider essential the capability of assigning meaning to perceptual flows that the autonomous agent obtains from its interaction with a surrounding physical world and the capability for introspection and self-awareness.

In this project we try to:

• investigate the nature and generation mechanisms of meaning in cognitive autonomous systems and also
• to apply the emerging concepts in two research platforms with very different cognitive requirements and contexts concerning objectives, complexity heterogeneity and scalability.

In this context, the project tries to build a formal theory of meaning to be applied in the definition of control mechanisms based on explicit representations of meaning. These mechanisms will be used in the design self-aware control architectures for autonomous systems and will be implemented in the form of reusable software components using standardized software deployment platforms.

Finally, as real testbeds, the conceptual framework, the architecture and the reusable modules will be used in two application domains: autonomous robots and continuous process plants.