Editorial: Neurorobotics explores the human senses

Mehdi Khamassi, Marco Mirolli, Christian Wallraven

Abstract: The present research topic of Frontiers in Neurorobotics, entitled 'Neurorobotics explores the human senses', presents a variety of research studies at the crossroads between Neuroscience, Developmental Psychology, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics. The main common point of these studies is the need to better understand how humans (and animals in general) perceive their surrounding world and use this knowledge for Robotics. For human-robot interaction applications, this requires to understand how humans perceive and react to different robots and their behaviors. For applications to autonomous robots, this implies to take inspiration from the way humans perceive and react to different types of stimuli.Research in AI and Robotics has always entertain at least some degree of loose inspiration from biology and human cognition. Among the classical examples illustrating this inspiration, one can simply observe the efforts made for years to design and test humanoid robots, whose body is inspired by human morphology.Another striking example relates to research on deep neural networks, loosely inspired by biological neurons in the brain, how they are connected and how the efficacy of their connection can be strengthen through learning. Even beyond these simple examples, some of the current research in AI takes inspiration from the human brain's cognitive architecture (as it is currently understood) (LeCun, 2022), and from the mechanisms of this architecture that contribute ...