Enactive self: A study of engineering perspectives to obtain the sensorimotor self through enaction

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the enactive self from a computational point of view and study the suitability of current methods to instantiate it onto robots. As an assumption, we consider any cognitive agent as an autonomous system that constructs its identity by continuous interaction with the environment. We start examining algorithms to learn the body-schema and to enable tool-extension, and we finalize by studying their viability for generalizing the enactive self computational model. This paper points out promising techniques for bodily self-modelling and exploration, as well as formally link sensorimotor models with differential kinematics. Although the study is restricted to basic sensorimotor construction of the self, some of the analysed works also traverse into more complex self constructions with a social component. Furthermore, we discuss the main gaps of current engineering approaches for modelling enactive robots and describe the main characteristics that a synthetic sensorimotor self-model should present.