In a big egg that has just opened, a tribe of young robotic creatures evolves and explores its environment, wreathed by a large zero that symbolizes the “origin.” Beyond their innate capabilities, they are outfitted with mechanisms that allow them to learn new skills and invent their own language. Endowed with artificial curiosity, they explore objects around them, as well as the effect their vocalizations produce on humans. Human, also curious to see what these creatures can do, react with their own gestures, creating a loop of interaction which progressively self-organizes into a new communication system established between man and ergo-robots.

“Ergo-Robots: Artificial Curiosity and Language” is an installation and experiment presented in the exhibition “Mathematics: A Beautiful Elsewhere“, from 21st october 2011 to 18th march 2012, in Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, France.

It features and experiments computational of models of curiosity-driven learning and its interaction with language formation in humans and robots developped by Pierre-Yves Oudeyer and his INRIA ENSTA ParisTech team, as well as earlier models developped with Frédéric Kaplan and by Luc Steels.

At the frontiers of sciences and art, exploring fundamental questions about the nature of humans and machines, it features robots that explore and learn about their environment through artificial curiosity, and at the same time invent their own language, to talk about their environment. Based onrecent advanced models of autonomous learning inspired by human infant development, they progressively acquire new skills, discover ways to communicate with humans, and self-organize their own culture.

The exhibition “Mathematics: A Beautiful Elsewhere”

From October 21, 2011 to March 18, 2012, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presents the exhibition “Mathematics: A Beautiful Elsewhere“, an exhibition developed in association with the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS) and under the patronage of UNESCO. Aiming to create opportunities for seeing, hearing, doing, thinking and interpreting mathematics, Michel Cassé, an astrophysicist, and Hervé Chandès, general director of the Fondation Cartier, guided by the mathematician Jean-Pierre Bourguignon who heads the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, conferred with prestigious mathematicians and scientists. The intellectual universe of mathematicians Sir Michael Atiyah, Alain Connes, Nicole EL Karoui, Misha Gromov, Cédric Villani and Don Zagier, is presented in interaction with artists Jean-Michel Alberola, Raymond Depardon, Claudine Nougaret, Takeshi Kitano, David Lynch, Beatriz Milhazes, Patti Smith, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. By bringing mathematics into its premises, the Fondation Cartier is itself undergoing the “sudden change of scenery” described by the mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck.

The installation Ergo-Robots / Flowers Fields appears in the space dedicated to Misha Gromov, and explores what he calls one of the “four great mysteries”: the origins of intelligence.

Team

Ergo-Robots is a project initiated and conceptualized by Pierre-Yves Oudeyer through an encounter with mathematician Mikhail Gromov (and his theory of ergo-systems), and benefited from a collaboration with artist David Lynch (who designed the head and the environment of the robots).

Its software and hardware development was realized by the INRIA ENSTA ParisTech Flowers team in collaboration with University of Bordeaux/Labri: Jérome Béchu, Fabien Bénureau, Haylee Fogg, Paul Fudal, Hugo Gimbert, Matthieu Lapeyre, Olivier Ly, Olivier Mangin, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Pierre Rouanet. Scenography was realized in collaboration with David Lynch and his team. Scenography was realiszed in collaboration with David Lynch and his team.

The Ergo-Robots hardware and software platform builds on a previous experimental set-up called “Flowers Fields”, designed to explore novel forms of human-robot interaction and realized in 2009 by Jérome Béchu and Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, followed by a second version realized with Olivier Ly et Fabien Bénureau.