An Incremental Self-Organizing Architecture for Sensorimotor Learning and Prediction
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During visuomotor tasks, robots have to compensate for the temporal delays inherent in their sensorimotor processing systems. This capability becomes crucial in a dynamic environment where the visual input is constantly changing, e.g. when interacting with humans. For this purpose, the robot should be equipped with a prediction mechanism able to use the acquired perceptual experience in order to estimate possible future motor commands. In this paper, we present a novel neural network architecture that learns prototypical visuomotor representations and provides reliable predictions to compensate for the delayed robot behavior in an online manner. We investigate the performance of our method in the context of a synchronization task, where a humanoid robot has to generate visually perceived arm motion trajectories in synchrony with a human demonstrator. We evaluate the prediction accuracy in terms of mean prediction error and analyze the response of the network to novel movement demonstrations. Additionally, we provide experiments with the system receiving incomplete data sequences, showing the robustness of the proposed architecture in the case of a noisy and faulty visual sensor.
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