In robotics and intelligent systems, there is a growing trend to include high level semantic knowledge for enabling better reasoning and increased functionality. One of the most important aspects in integrating is the problem of intrinsically linking the symbols used by a cognitive agent to their corresponding meanings through grounding language in perception and action. This is widely known as the “Symbol Grounding Problem(SGP)” defined by Harnad in 1990, where a linguistic symbol representing a meaning, needs to be grounded in the perceived world. For cognitive agents and robots, a subset of symbol grounding is the anchoring problem which focuses on the connection between symbols and physical object while interacting in the environment.

In a multi-robot system, this problem is more challenging as symbols have not only to be grounded, but commonly shared in order to facilitate the exchange of information. This is called the social grounding problem. This also raises questions with respect to human-robot dialog modeling, where symbols and their references need to be communicated and how the social grounding between robots can be made transparent to a human interaction partner. This special issue includes technical papers, reports on current research projects, interviews, book reviews and others with focus on current developments and challenges in Symbol Grounding in intelligent systems.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

– Symbol Grounding in intelligent systems

– Social Symbol grounding

– Anchoring symbols to sensor data form physical objects

– Symbol Grounding applied to language acquisition

– Symbol Grounding in robotics and intelligent systems

– AI applications of Symbol Grounding

– Knowledge representation and reasoning for robotics and intelligent systems

– Dialog modeling and Symbol Grounding

Interested authors should contact one of the guest editors to discuss a possible contribution:

Prof. Silvia Coradeschi

AASS, Orebro University

SE70182 Orebro, Sweden

silvia.coradeschi@oru.se

Docent Amy Loutfi

AASS, Orebro University

SE70182 Orebro, Sweden

amy.loutfi@oru.se

Dr.-Ing. Britta Wrede

CoR-Lab / Applied Informatics

Bielefeld University

bwrede@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de