Bodily aware soft robots: integration of proprioceptive and exteroceptive sensors
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Being aware of our body has great importance in our everyday life. This is the reason why we know how to move in a dark room or to grasp a complex object. These skills are important for robots as well, however, robotic bodily awareness is still an unsolved problem. In this paper we present a novel method to implement bodily awareness in soft robots by the integration of exteroceptive and proprioceptive sensors. We use a combination of a stacked convolutional autoencoder and a recurrent neural network to map internal sensory signals to visual information. As a result, the simulated soft robot can learn to imagine its motion even when its visual sensor is not available.
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