Active motor babbling for sensorimotor learning

For a complex autonomous robotic system such as a humanoid robot, motor-babbling-based sensorimotor learning is considered an effective method to develop an internal model of the self-body and the environment autonomously. In this paper, we propose a method of sensorimotor learning and evaluate it performance in active learning. The proposed model is characterized by a function we call the “confidence”, and is a measure of the reliability of state prediction and control. The confidence for the state can be a good measure to bias the next exploration strategy of data sampling, and to direct its attention to areas in the state domain less reliably predicted and controlled. We consider the confidence function to be a first step toward an active behavior design for autonomous environment adaptation. The approach was experimentally validated using the humanoid robot James.