Outcome Based Operation

Shades of "Dark Star" and the argumentative bomb. Machines do not think or reason. Seems to be a ploy to get more funding.

I don't think it's a ploy, although use of the word "cognitive" does connote the ability to reason. "At ABB, we use the phrase 'cognitive robotics' to describe robots that can sense and react to changes ...", that's the key statement from the article, and it doesn't require cognition to implement. Many people are doing this; I did something similar for my PhD work. However, I didn't call it cognitive robotics, just biomimetic sensing. You still have to give the robot some objective and set of rules from which to act.