Goal babbling with unknown ranges: A direction-sampling approach

Abstract

Goal babbling is a recent concept for the efficient bootstrapping of sensorimotor coordination that is inspired by infants' early goal-directed movement attempts. Several studies have shown its superior performance compared to random motor babbling. Yet, previous implementations of goal babbling require knowledge of a set of achievable goals in advance. This paper introduces an approach to goal babbling that can bootstrap coordination skills without pre-specifying, or even representing, a set of goals. On the contrary, it can discover the ranges of achievable goals autonomously. This capability is demonstrated in a challenging task with up to 50 degrees of freedom, in which the discovery of possible outcomes is shown to be desperately intractable with random motor babbling.