Exploring the world through grasping: a developmental approach

Abstract

This paper is about the implementation of grasping skills in a humanoid robot. Following a developmental approach, the robot is initially equipped with little perceptual and motor competencies whose role is to bootstrap learning through the exploration of the external environment. This crude form of sensorimotor coordination consists of a set of control systems and explorative behaviors as well as simple visual routines. The developmental path leads the robot from the exploration of the physics and geometry of its body to the probing of the external environment. The robot experience builds and modifies continuously its internal representations of the environment, being this, its body or the objects it encounters. We discuss the implications of our approach to the study of cognition and our effort to build a cognitive artificial system.