Bootstrapping bilinear models of robotic sensorimotor cascades

Abstract

We consider the bootstrapping problem, which consists in learning a model of the agent's sensors and actuators starting from zero prior information, and we take the problem of servoing as a cross-modal task to validate the learned models. We study the class of bilinear dynamics sensors, in which the derivative of the observations are a bilinear form of the control commands and the observations themselves. This class of models is simple yet general enough to represent the main phenomena of three representative robotics sensors (field sampler, camera, and range-finder), apparently very different from one another. It also allows a bootstrapping algorithm based on hebbian learning, and that leads to a simple and bioplausible control strategy. The convergence properties of learning and control are demonstrated with extensive simulations and by analytical arguments.

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