Towards incremental hierarchical behavior generation for humanoids

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we present a new conceptual framework for modeling incremental hierarchical behavior control systems for humanoids. The biological motivation and the key elements are discussed. Second, we show our current instance of such a behavior control system, called ALIS. It is designed according to the concepts presented within the framework. The system is integrated with the humanoid ASIMO and comprises visual saliency computation and auditory source localization for gaze selection, a visual proto-object based fixation and short term memory of the current visual field of view, the online learning of visual appearances of such proto-objects and an interaction oriented control of the humanoid body including walking. Humans can freely interact with the system in real-time. Experiments show the feasibility of the chosen ansatz.