Active perception for action mirroring

The paper describes a constructive approach on active perception for anthropomorphic robots. The key idea is that a robot tries to identify a human´s action as an own action based on the observation of action effects for objects. In the proposed framework, the active perception is decomposed into the three phases; First, a robot voluntarily generates actions to discover the own body and objects. Second, the robot characterizes its own action with the effect for the objects. Third, the robot identifies the human action with the own action. The mirrored perception of the own action and the human´s action allows the robot to share the goal-directed behavior with humans. The proposed framework of active perception was experimentally validated with the integrated sensory modalities of vision, proprioception and touch.