Abstract
The development of a robot whose ultimate task is to serve humans as a companion in their daily life is the objective of a European projectt called“The Cognitive Robot Companion”, one of the projects funded by the“Beyond Robotics”initiative. The robot is not only considered as a ready-made device but as an artificial creature, which improves its capabilities in a continuous process of acquiring and learning new knowledge and skills. Besides the necessary functions for sensing, moving and acting, such a robot will exhibit the cognitive capacities enabling it to focus its attention and to make decisions, to understand the spatial and dynamic struc-ture of its environment, to interact with it, to exhibit a social behaviour, and to communicate with humans at the appropriate level of abstraction according to the context.
