Developmental action perception for manipulative interaction

Abstract

The paper describes a developmental framework of action-driven perception in anthropomorphic robots. The key idea of the framework is that action develops the agent's perception of the own body and its action. In this framework, a robot voluntarily generates movements, and then develops the ability to perceive its own body and the effects of action primitives. The robot, moreover, demonstrates manipulative actions composed of the learned primitives, and characterizes the actions based on their sensory effects. After learning, the robot can predictively recognize humans' manipulative actions with cross-modal recovery of unavailable sensory information and reproduce the recognized actions. We evaluated the proposed framework in experiments with a real robot. In the experiments, we achieved developmental recognition of human actions as well as their reproduction.