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The mechanisms of infant development are far from understood. Learning about one's own body is likely a foundation for subsequent development. Here we look specifically at the problem of how spontaneous touches to the body in early infancy…
Motor babbling and goal babbling has been used for sensorimotor learning of highly redundant systems in soft robotics. Recent works in goal babbling has demonstrated successful learning of inverse kinematics (IK) on such systems, and…
The young infant explores its body, its sensorimotor system, and the immediately accessible parts of its environment, over the course of a few months creating a model of peripersonal space useful for reaching and grasping objects around it.…
How dynamic interactions between nervous system regions in mammals performs online motor control remains an unsolved problem. In this paper we show that feedback control is a simple, yet powerful way to understand the neural dynamics of…
One of the first and foremost non-verbal interactions that humans perform is a handshake. It has an impact on first impressions as touch can convey complex emotions. This makes handshaking an important skill for the repertoire of a social…
While the original goal for developing robots is replacing humans in dangerous and tedious tasks, the final target shall be completely mimicking the human cognitive and motor behaviour. Hence, building detailed computational models for the…
We present a computational model of the mechanisms that may determine infants' behavior in the "mobile paradigm". This paradigm has been used in developmental psychology to explore how infants learn the sensory effects of their actions. In…
Sufficiently perceiving the environment is a critical factor in robot motion generation. Although the introduction of deep visual processing models have contributed in extending this ability, existing methods lack in the ability to actively…
Tactile perception is an essential ability of intelligent robots in interaction with their surrounding environments. This perception as an intermediate level acts between sensation and action and has to be defined properly to generate…
To coordinate actions with an interaction partner requires a constant exchange of sensorimotor signals. Humans acquire these skills in infancy and early childhood mostly by imitation learning and active engagement with a skilled partner.…
We address the problem of bootstrapping language acquisition for an artificial system similarly to what is observed in experiments with human infants. Our method works by associating meanings to words in manipulation tasks, as a robot…
Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed…
Grasping in dynamic environments presents a unique set of challenges. A stable and reachable grasp can become unreachable and unstable as the target object moves, motion planning needs to be adaptive and in real time, the delay in…
Inspired by animals that co-adapt their brain and body to interact with the environment, we present a tendon-driven and over-actuated (i.e., n joint, n+1 actuators) bipedal robot that (i) exploits its backdrivable mechanical properties to…
Among the infinite number of possible movements that can be produced, humans are commonly assumed to choose those that optimize criteria such as minimizing movement time, subject to certain movement constraints like signal-dependent and…
Human interaction involves very sophisticated non-verbal communication skills like understanding the goals and actions of others and coordinating our own actions accordingly. Neuroscience refers to this mechanism as motor resonance, in the…
We propose an active learning architecture for robots, capable of organizing its learning process to achieve a field of complex tasks by learning sequences of motor policies, called Intrinsically Motivated Procedure Babbling (IM-PB). The…
Mobile manipulators require coordinated control between navigation and manipulation to accomplish tasks. Typically, coordinated mobile manipulation behaviors have base navigation to approach the goal followed by arm manipulation to reach…
Human infants are able to acquire natural language seemingly easily at an early age. Their language learning seems to occur simultaneously with learning other cognitive functions as well as with playful interactions with the environment and…
The cerebellum plays a distinctive role within our motor control system to achieve fine and coordinated motions. While cerebellar lesions do not lead to a complete loss of motor functions, both action and perception are severally impacted.…