Representations of body schemas for infant robot development

Psychological studies have often suggested that internal models of the body and its structure are used to process sensory inputs such as proprioception from muscles and joints. Within robotics, there is often a need to have an internal representation of the body, integrating the multi-modal and multi-dimensional spaces in which it operates. Here we propose a body model in the form of a series of distributed spatial maps, that have not been purpose designed but have emerged through our experiments on developmental stages using a minimalist content-neutral approach. The result is an integrated series of 2D maps storing correlations and contingencies across modalities, which has some resonances with the structures used in the brain for sensorimotor coordination.