title: Peripersonal Space and Margin of Safety around the Body: Learning Visuo-Tactile Associations in a Humanoid Robot with Artificial Skin.
abstract: This paper investigates a biologically motivated model of peripersonal space through its implementation on a humanoid robot. Guided by the present understanding of the neurophysiology of the fronto-parietal system, we developed a computational model inspired by the receptive fields of polymodal neurons identified, for example, in brain areas F4 and VIP. The experiments on the iCub humanoid robot show that the peripersonal space representation i) can be learned efficiently and in real-time via a simple interaction with the robot, ii) can lead to the generation of behaviors like avoidance and reaching, and iii) can contribute to the understanding the biological principle of motor equivalence. More specifically, with respect to i) the present model contributes to hypothesizing a learning mechanisms for peripersonal space. In relation to point ii) we show how a relatively simple controller can exploit the learned receptive fields to generate either avoidance or reaching of an incoming stimulus and for iii) we show how the robot can select arbitrary body parts as the controlled end-point of an avoidance or reaching movement.
authors.affiliation: iCub Facility, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy.|Social Robotics Lab, Computer Science Department, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States of America.
authors.forename: Alessandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Roncone
authors.affiliation: iCub Facility, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy.
authors.forename: Matej
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8137-3412
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hoffmann
authors.affiliation: iCub Facility, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy.
authors.forename: Ugo
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8754-1632
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Pattacini
authors.affiliation: Robotics, Brain, and Cognitive Sciences Department, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy.|Section of Human Physiology, Ferrara University, Ferrara, Italy.
authors.forename: Luciano
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Fadiga
authors.affiliation: iCub Facility, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy.
authors.forename: Giorgio
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Metta
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology; D010550:Personal Space; D011336:Probability; D012371:Robotics; D012449:Safety; D017768:Skin, Artificial; D013028:Space Perception; D055698:Touch Perception; D014796:Visual Perception