Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies
Gregorian Chat: Social Robotics and Storytelling
Gregorian Chat is an EPSRC-oriented project exploring the potential for collaborative behaviour in social robots based upon the exchange of narrative information. The project uses real and virtual robots, modelling their adaptive interactions with each other and with their environment on the premise that they communicate and develop their information base by telling each other stories.
The title "Gregorian Chat" is a punning allusion to Daniel Dennett's "tower of generate and test," specifically the level he names in honour of psychologist Richard Gregory, which provides for an internal modelling of the environment which is informed by culturally shared information. That is, the project posits story exchange as the basis of a robot culture.
The project, which brings together embodied and simulated robotics, complex adaptive systems modelling, and narrative theory, is a collaboration between Alan Winfield (UWE), Jim Bown (Abertay), Susan Stepney (York) and Richard Walsh (York).