First steps towards the development of the sense of object permanence in robots

Evidence in developmental studies showed that infants, around the age of three months, are already able to represent and to reason about hidden objects [1]. We investigate the development of the sense of object permanence in robots. In the preliminary experiment presented here, a humanoid robot has to learn how the movements of its arms affect the visual detection of an object in the scene. The robot is holding a shield in its left hand, which can eventually hide the object from the visual input. As learning mechanism, we adopted a goal-directed exploration behaviour inspired on human development: the Intelligent Adaptive Curiosity (IAC) proposed by Oudeyer, Kaplan and Hafner [2]. We present an implementation of IAC on the humanoid robot Aldebaran Nao and we compare its performance with that of a random exploration strategy.