A sensorimotor approach for self-learning of hand-eye coordination

Abstract

This paper presents a sensorimotor contingencies (SMC) based method to fully autonomously learn to perform hand-eye coordination. We divide the task into two visuomotor subtasks, visual fixation and reaching, and implement these on a PR2 robot assuming no prior information on its kinematic model. Our contributions are three-fold: i) grounding a robot in the environment by exploiting SMCs in the action planning system, which eliminates the need for prior knowledge of the kinematic or dynamic models of the robot; ii) using a forward model to search for proper actions to solve the task by minimizing a cost function, instead of training a separate inverse model, to speed up training; iii) encoding 3D spatial positions of a target object based on the robot's joint positions, thus avoiding calibration with respect to an external coordinate system. The method is capable of learning the task of hand-eye coordination from scratch by less than 20 sensory-motor pairs that are iteratively generated at real-time speed. In order to examine the robustness of the method while dealing with nonlinear image distortions, we apply a so-called retinal mapping image deformation to the input images. Experimental results show the successfulness of the method even under considerable image deformations.