Re:Willing to answer questions (Score 1)

As you say, one of the major thrusts now is to get the robot to model not just itself, but its immediate surroundings. We're also pursuing the idea of having a group of robots work together to model themselves (http://www.cs.uvm.edu/~jbongard/papers/2007_GECCO _Bongard2.pdf). You raise a good point about motivation. As far as I know, this is an open question in AI: how can you build a robot that will develop its own motivations?