Grounding Perception: A Developmental Approach to Sensorimotor Contingencies
This addresses the challenge of grounding perception in robotics, which is an incremental step in applying sensorimotor contingency theory to autonomous systems.
The paper tackles the problem of autonomous acquisition of sensorimotor contingencies in robotics by proposing a developmental framework where a naive robot encodes contingencies as predictive models through exploration, with preliminary applications in discovering the environment, objects, and a visual field.
Sensorimotor contingency theory offers a promising account of the nature of perception, a topic rarely addressed in the robotics community. We propose a developmental framework to address the problem of the autonomous acquisition of sensorimotor contingencies by a naive robot. While exploring the world, the robot internally encodes contingencies as predictive models that capture the structure they imply in its sensorimotor experience. Three preliminary applications are presented to illustrate our approach to the acquisition of perceptive abilities: discovering the environment, discovering objects, and discovering a visual field.