Towards a learnt neural body schema for dexterous coordination of action in humanoid and industrial robots

Bhat, Ajaz Ahmad ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6992-8224, Akkaladevi, Sharath Chandra, Mohan, Vishwanathan, Eitzinger, Christian and Morasso, Pietro (2016) Towards a learnt neural body schema for dexterous coordination of action in humanoid and industrial robots. Autonomous Robots, 41. 945–966. ISSN 1573-7527

Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)

Abstract

During any goal oriented behavior the dual processes of generation of dexterous actions and anticipation of the consequences of potential actions must seamlessly alternate. This article presents a unified neural framework for generation and forward simulation of goal directed actions and validates the architecture through diverse experiments on humanoid and industrial robots. The basic idea is that actions are consequences of an simulation process that animates the internal model of the body (namely the body schema), in the context of intended goals/constraints. Specific focus is on (a) Learning: how the internal model of the body can be acquired by any robotic embodiment and extended to coordinated tools; (b) Configurability: how diverse forward/inverse models of action can be ‘composed’ at runtime by coupling/decoupling different body (body + tool) chains with task relevant goals and constraints represented as multi-referential force fields; and (c) Computational simplicity: how both the synthesis of motor commands to coordinate highly redundant systems and the ensuing forward simulations are realized through well-posed computations without kinematic inversions. The performance of the neural architecture is demonstrated through a range of motor tasks on a 53-DoFs robot iCub and two industrial robots performing real world assembly with emphasis on dexterity, accuracy, speed, obstacle avoidance, multiple task-specific constraints, task-based configurability. Putting into context other ideas in motor control like the Equilibrium Point Hypothesis, Optimal Control, Active Inference and emerging studies from neuroscience, the relevance of the proposed framework is also discussed.

Item Type: Article
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Developmental Science
Depositing User: LivePure Connector
Date Deposited: 05 May 2020 00:07
Last Modified: 22 Oct 2022 06:06
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/74983
DOI: 10.1007/s10514-016-9563-3

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item