Perception through visuomotor anticipation in a mobile robot

  • Authors:
  • Heiko Hoffmann

  • Affiliations:
  • Cognitive Robotics, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Amalienstr. 33, 80799 Munich, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Neural Networks
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Several scientists suggested that certain perceptual qualities are based on sensorimotor anticipation: for example, the softness of a sponge is perceived by anticipating the sensations resulting from a grasping movement. For the perception of spatial arrangements, this article demonstrates that this concept can be realized in a mobile robot. The robot first learned to predict how its visual input changes under movement commands. With this ability, two perceptual tasks could be solved: judging the distance to an obstacle in front by 'mentally' simulating a movement toward the obstacle, and recognizing a dead end by simulating either an obstacle-avoidance algorithm or a recursive search for an exit. A simulated movement contained a series of prediction steps. In each step, a multilayer perceptron anticipated the next image, which, however, became increasingly noisy. To denoise an image, it was split into patches, and each patch was projected onto a manifold obtained by modelling the density of the distribution of training patches with a mixture of Gaussian functions.