GeMuCo: Generalized Multisensory Correlational Model for Body Schema Learning
This addresses the challenge of enabling robots to autonomously adapt to body and environmental changes, which is incremental as it builds on existing body schema concepts but extends them to a generalized framework.
The paper tackles the problem of robots lacking autonomous body schema learning and adaptation by proposing GeMuCo, a model that enables robots to learn sensor-actuator correlations from experience and adapt online, demonstrating effectiveness in tool-use, joint-muscle mapping, and full-body manipulation tasks.
Humans can autonomously learn the relationship between sensation and motion in their own bodies, estimate and control their own body states, and move while continuously adapting to the current environment. On the other hand, current robots control their bodies by learning the network structure described by humans from their experiences, making certain assumptions on the relationship between sensors and actuators. In addition, the network model does not adapt to changes in the robot's body, the tools that are grasped, or the environment, and there is no unified theory, not only for control but also for state estimation, anomaly detection, simulation, and so on. In this study, we propose a Generalized Multisensory Correlational Model (GeMuCo), in which the robot itself acquires a body schema describing the correlation between sensors and actuators from its own experience, including model structures such as network input/output. The robot adapts to the current environment by updating this body schema model online, estimates and controls its body state, and even performs anomaly detection and simulation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method by applying it to tool-use considering changes in grasping state for an axis-driven robot, to joint-muscle mapping learning for a musculoskeletal robot, and to full-body tool manipulation for a low-rigidity plastic-made humanoid.