Intelligent machine brain understands natural language

The system brain or ‘sysbrain’ could be used for guiding autonomous satellites and spacecraft but project leader Prof Sandor Veres, from Southampton University, said the system has ‘enormous scope’ for industry and consumers.

‘Essentially we’ve developed a system to give some intelligence to machines, not as human intelligence but specific to particular tasks such as spatiotemporal awareness and avoiding dangerous situations,’ he said. ‘Think about what a spacecraft would need in a mission through the asteroid belt.’

The unique thing about the sysbrain as a control system is that it uses natural language programming (NLP), so it can understand and interpret English-language technical documents.

‘I wanted to enable engineers, who are not highly versed in programming and in [software] agents, to be able to define behaviours, goals, plans and execution sequences — basically solutions for problems — as easily as possible.’

What’s more, engineers could write documents that might enhance the physical or problem-solving skills of robots and machines then put them on the internet to share, essentially creating a community analogous to the open-source publishing model.