Shaking eases Object Category Acquisition: Experiments with a Robot Arm

Abstract

This paper introduces a synthetic study which investigates the role of shaking behav-ior in object category acquisition. By shaking objects with several holding positions and ob-taining the amplitude spectrums of the audi-tory signal, a robot with poor control ability can acquire object categories such as rigid ob-jects, paper materials, and PET bottles with water. The result indicates the possiblity that dynamic touch is more e®ective for categoriza-tion than static touch such as grasping since they provide the agent with the information of the whole object enabling them to acquire object categories independent of size, shape, and contact condition. 1.