title: Perception through visuomotor anticipation in a mobile robot.
abstract: Several scientists suggested that certain perceptual qualities are based on sensorimotor anticipation: for example, the softness of a sponge is perceived by anticipating the sensations resulting from a grasping movement. For the perception of spatial arrangements, this article demonstrates that this concept can be realized in a mobile robot. The robot first learned to predict how its visual input changes under movement commands. With this ability, two perceptual tasks could be solved: judging the distance to an obstacle in front by 'mentally' simulating a movement toward the obstacle, and recognizing a dead end by simulating either an obstacle-avoidance algorithm or a recursive search for an exit. A simulated movement contained a series of prediction steps. In each step, a multilayer perceptron anticipated the next image, which, however, became increasingly noisy. To denoise an image, it was split into patches, and each patch was projected onto a manifold obtained by modelling the density of the distribution of training patches with a mixture of Gaussian functions.
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Robotics, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Amalienstr. 33, 80799 Munich, Germany. heiko.hoffmann@ed.ac.uk
authors.forename: Heiko
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Hoffmann
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001288:Attention; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D003198:Computer Simulation; D018737:Hand Strength; D006801:Humans; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010465:Perception; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D012371:Robotics