Evan Ackerman, writing for IEEE Spectrum’s Automaton blog, reports that researchers at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology have built a pair of mobile robots called Lingodroids with the capability to invent and use words to help them navigate through unfamiliar environments.
If one of the robots finds itself in an unfamiliar area, it’ll make up a word to describe it, choosing a random combination from a set of syllables. It then communicates that word to other robots that it meets, thereby defining the name of a place.
From this fundamental base, the robots can play games with each other to reinforce the language. For example, one robot might tell the other robot “kuzo,” and then both robots will race to where they think “kuzo” is. When they meet at or close to the same place, that reinforces the connection between a word and a location. And from “kuzo,” one robot can ask the other about the place they just came from, resulting in words for more abstract concepts like direction and distance.
Lingodroid Robots Invent Their Own Spoken Language (Thanks, Sara!)