Cognitive robotics - active perception of the self and others

Abstract

The paper describes constructive approach of active perception for anthropomorphic robots. The key idea is that a robot tries to identify a human's action as an own action based on the observation of action effects for objects. In the proposed framework, the active perception are decomposed into the three phases; (1) a robot voluntarily generates actions to discover the own body and other objects. Here the object is defined as what the robot can interact with. (2) the robot characterizes its own action with its effect for objects. (3) the robot identifies the human action as the own action. The mirrored perception of the own action and the human's action allows the robot to share motor intelligence with humans. The approach was evaluated in experiments with a humanoid robot equipped with multi sensory modalities such as vision, tactile, and proprioceptive sensing.