# DAC-h3: A Proactive Robot Cognitive Architecture to Acquire and Express Knowledge About the World and the Self

## TL;DR

DAC-h3 is a biologically-inspired cognitive architecture enabling humanoid robots to proactively explore, learn, and communicate about their environment and self, integrating perception, planning, and language in real-time interactions.

## Contribution

This work introduces a novel proactive cognitive architecture for robots that combines multiple learning and planning modules grounded in biological theories, enabling autonomous and interactive behavior.

## Key findings

- The architecture allows real-time, goal-directed robot behavior.
- It effectively enables language acquisition and narrative expression.
- The system functions successfully with naive users in realistic scenarios.

## Abstract

This paper introduces a cognitive architecture for a humanoid robot to engage in a proactive, mixed-initiative exploration and manipulation of its environment, where the initiative can originate from both the human and the robot. The framework, based on a biologically-grounded theory of the brain and mind, integrates a reactive interaction engine, a number of state-of-the-art perceptual and motor learning algorithms, as well as planning abilities and an autobiographical memory. The architecture as a whole drives the robot behavior to solve the symbol grounding problem, acquire language capabilities, execute goal-oriented behavior, and express a verbal narrative of its own experience in the world. We validate our approach in human-robot interaction experiments with the iCub humanoid robot, showing that the proposed cognitive architecture can be applied in real time within a realistic scenario and that it can be used with naive users.