Active learning for sensorimotor coordinations of autonomous robots

For a complex autonomous robotic system such as a humanoid robot, motor-babbling-based sensorimotor learning is considered an effective method to develop an internal model of the self-body and the environment autonomously. However, learning process requires much time for exploration and computation. In this paper, we propose a method of sensorimotor learning which explores the learning domain actively. Our approach discovers that the embodied learning system can design its own learning process actively, which is different from the conventional passive data-access machine learning. The proposed model is characterized by a function we call the ldquoconfidencerdquo, and is a measure of the reliability of state control. The confidence for the state can be a good measure to bias the exploration strategy of data sampling, and to direct its attention to areas of learning interest. We consider the confidence function to be a first step toward an active behavior design for autonomous environment adaptation. The approach was experimentally validated in typical sensorimotor coordination such as arm reaching and object fixation, using the humanoid robot James and the iCub simulator.