A developmental approach to grasping

In this paper we describe a developmental path which allows a humanoid robot to initiate interaction with the environment by grasping objects. Development begins with the exploration of the robot’s own body (control of the head and arm, identification of the hand) and moves afterward to the external world (reaching and grasping). A final experiment is reported to illustrate how these simple behaviors can be integrated to start autonomous exploration of the environment. In fact we believe that for an active system the capacity to act is not a mere arrival point but it is rather required in order for the system to further develop by acquiring and structuring information about its environment.

[1]  C. Hofsten.  Catching Skills in Infancy , 1983 .

[2]  Peter M. Vishton,et al.  Predictive action in infancy: tracking and reaching for moving objects , 1998, Cognition.

[3]  M. Graziano.  Where is my arm? The relative role of vision and proprioception in the neuronal representation of limb position. , 1999, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[4]  Giorgio Metta,et al.  BabyRoBot: A study in sensori-motor development , 1999 .

[5]  M S Graziano,et al.  Coding the location of the arm by sight. , 2000, Science.

[6]  P. Rochat,et al.  Perceived self in infancy , 2000 .

[7]  Giulio Sandini,et al.  Development of auditory-evoked reflexes: Visuo-acoustic cues integration in a binocular head , 2002, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[8]  Giulio Sandini,et al.  Learning to Act on Objects , 2002, Biologically Motivated Computer Vision.

[9]  Giulio Sandini,et al.  Learning visual stabilization reflexes in robots with moving eyes , 2002, Neurocomputing.

[10]  Giulio Sandini,et al.  Learning about objects through action - initial steps towards artificial cognition , 2003, 2003 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.03CH37422).

[11]  Paul M. Fitzpatrick,et al.  Developmentally deep perceptual system for a humanoid robot , 2003 .

[12]  M. Asada,et al.  Does the invariance in multi-modalities represent the body scheme ?-a case study with vision and proprioception - , 2003 .

[13]  Giorgio Metta,et al.  Early integration of vision and manipulation , 2003, Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, 2003..

[14]  L. Natale,et al.  Learning haptic representation of objects , 2004 .

[15]  Lorenzo Natale,et al.  Linking Action to Perception in a Humanoid Robot: a Developmental Approach to Grasping , 2004 .