Babybot, a robot modeled on the torso of a 2-year-old child, is helping researchers take the first tottering steps toward understanding human perception, possibly leading to the development of machines that can perceive and interact with their environments.

Researchers in the European Commission's Artificial Development Approach to Presence Technologies (ADAPT) project used Babybot to test a model of the human sense of "presence," a combination of senses like sight, hearing and touch. The work could have enormous applications in robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine perception, they say.

"Our sense of presence is essentially our consciousness," says Giorgio Metta, ADAPT project coordinator and assistant professor at the Laboratory for Integrated Advanced Robotics at Italy's Genoa University.

Imagine a glorious day spent lying on a beach drinking a pina colada, or having any powerful, pleasurable memory. A series of specific sensory inputs is essential to the memory. In the human mind, all these sensations combine to create the total experience. It profoundly influences our future expectations, and each time we go to a beach, we add to the store of contexts, situations and conditions. It is the combination of all this data and its cumulative power that the ADAPT researchers sought to explore.

"We took an engineering approach to the problem," says Metta. "It was really a consciousness for engineers, which means we first developed a model and then we sought to test this model by, in this case, developing a robot to conform to it."