Humanoid learns to detect its own hands

Abstract

Robust object manipulation is still a hard problem in robotics, even more so in high degree-of-freedom (DOF) humanoid robots. To improve performance a closer integration of visual and motor systems is needed. We herein present a novel method for a robot to learn robust detection of its own hands and fingers enabling sensorimotor coordination. It does so solely using its own camera images and does not require any external systems or markers. Our system based on Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP) allows to evolve programs to perform this image segmentation task in real-time on the real hardware. We show results for a Nao and an iCub humanoid each detecting its own hands and fingers.