Related papers: Neuroscience-inspired perception-action in robotic…

Active inference is a unifying theory for perception and action resting upon the idea that the brain maintains an internal model of the world by minimizing free energy. From a behavioral perspective, active inference agents can be seen as…

We present a pixel-based deep active inference algorithm (PixelAI) inspired by human body perception and action. Our algorithm combines the free-energy principle from neuroscience, rooted in variational inference, with deep convolutional…

Active inference is a mathematical framework that originated in computational neuroscience. Recently, it has been demonstrated as a promising approach for constructing goal-driven behavior in robotics. Specifically, the active inference…

My overarching research goal is to provide robots with perceptional abilities that allow interactions with humans in a human-like manner. To develop these perceptional abilities, I believe that it is useful to study the principles of the…

This paper presents a novel approach to Autonomous Vehicle (AV) control through the application of active inference, a theory derived from neuroscience that conceptualizes the brain as a predictive machine. Traditional autonomous driving…

While humans are aware of their body and capabilities, robots are not. To address this, we present in this paper a neural network architecture that enables a dual-arm robot to get a sense of itself in an environment. Our approach is…

With recent and rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), understanding the foundation of purposeful behaviour in autonomous agents is crucial for developing safe and efficient systems. While artificial neural networks have…

Brain-controlled robots are a promising new type of assistive device for severely impaired persons. Little is however known about how to optimize the interaction of humans and brain-controlled robots. Information about the human's perceived…

Reasoning about objects, relations, and physics is central to human intelligence, and a key goal of artificial intelligence. Here we introduce the interaction network, a model which can reason about how objects in complex systems interact,…

Inferential decision-making algorithms typically assume that an underlying probabilistic model of decision alternatives and outcomes may be learned a priori or online. Furthermore, when applied to robots in real-world settings they often…

Artificial self-perception is the machine ability to perceive its own body, i.e., the mastery of modal and intermodal contingencies of performing an action with a specific sensors/actuators body configuration. In other words, the…

Neuroscience has long informed the development of artificial neural networks, but the success of modern architectures invites, in turn, the converse: can modern networks teach us lessons about brain function? Here, we examine the structure…

When encountering novel objects, humans are able to infer a wide range of physical properties such as mass, friction and deformability by interacting with them in a goal driven way. This process of active interaction is in the same spirit…

Animals exploit time to survive in the world. Temporal information is required for higher-level cognitive abilities such as planning, decision making, communication, and effective cooperation. Since time is an inseparable part of cognition,…

Human perception and behavior are affected by the situational context, in particular during social interactions. A recent study demonstrated that humans perceive visual stimuli differently depending on whether they do the task by themselves…

A large body of compelling evidence has been accumulated demonstrating that embodiment - the agent's physical setup, including its shape, materials, sensors and actuators - is constitutive for any form of cognition and as a consequence,…

At the core of bodily self-consciousness is the perception of the ownership of one's body. Recent efforts to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind the brain's encoding of the self-body have led to various attempts to develop…

Imitation can allow us to quickly gain an understanding of a new task. Through a demonstration, we can gain direct knowledge about which actions need to be performed and which goals they have. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to…

A robot operating in isolation needs to reason over the uncertainty in its model of the world and adapt its own actions to account for this uncertainty. Similarly, a robot interacting with people needs to reason over its uncertainty over…

Mind perception in robots has been an understudied construct in human-robot interaction (HRI) compared to similar concepts such as anthropomorphism and the intentional stance. In a series of three experiments, we identify two factors that…