Endowing Artificial Systems with Anticipatory Capabilities: Success Cases

This book has provided various theoretical perspectives on anticipatory processes in natural and artificial cognitive systems. Advantages have been proposed and confirmed in various detailed case studies, which may have given the reader detailed insights into anticipatory processes and their importance in various cognitive systems tasks. To wrap up these advantages and give a concluding overview of various current anticipatory process advantages, this final chapter highlights a concise collection of precise success stories of anticipations in artificial cognitive systems. We survey fourteen case studies, which were developed during the EU project MindRACES. In these studies, simulated or real robots were tested in different environmental tasks, which required advanced sensorimotor and cognitive abilities. These abilities included the initiation and control of goal-directed actions, the orientation of attention, finding and reaching goal locations, and performing mental experiments for action selection. All the studies have shown advantages of anticipatory mechanisms compared to reactive mechanisms in terms of increased robot autonomy and adaptivity. In some cases, anticipations even caused the development of new cognitive abilities, which were simply impossible without anticipatory mechanisms.