Self-learning and adaptation in a sensorimotor framework

We present a general framework to autonomously achieve the task of finding a sequence of actions that result in a desired state. Autonomy is acquired by learning sensorimotor patterns of a robot, while it is interacting with its environment. Gaussian processes (GP) with automatic relevance determination are used to learn the sensorimotor mapping. In this way, relevant sensory and motor components can be systematically found in high-dimensional sensory and motor spaces. We propose an incremental GP learning strategy, which discerns between situations, when an update or an adaptation must be implemented. The Rapidly exploring Random Tree (RRT*) algorithm is exploited to enable long-term planning and generating a sequence of states that lead to a given goal; while a gradient-based search finds the optimum action to steer to a neighbouring state in a single time step. Our experimental results prove the suitability of the proposed framework to learn a joint space controller with high data dimensions (10×15). It demonstrates short training phase (less than 12 seconds), real-time performance and rapid adaptations capabilities.