A Method for Sustaining Consistent Sensory-Motor Coordination under Body Property Changes Including Tool Grasp/Release

摘要

The body's physical and spatial properties change because of unexpected accidents or objects it holds (e.g., tools). To maintain stable and consistent behaviors in acting time, it is necessary to adapt body representation to the unexpected changes. This adaptation is achieved when a robot sustains its coordination between sensation and body motion, i.e., observation and identification of the discrepancy between its knowledge and actually obtained sensory feedback. For sustainability, the robot should autonomously judge the reliability and the tolerance of the identification. Based on basic mathematics, we propose a method with an indirect but clear criterion of the reliability for the sustainable coordinations. We also implement the method on visual-motor coordination and on kinesthetic-motor coordination. Remarkably, our method achieves a marker-free, easily convergent and sufficiently accurate (i.e., easily applicable) hand-eye calibration method with irrelevant objects in view. The evaluation of the method is provided with experiments in a real robot. Our experimental results show the novelty of the concept of sustainable coordination and the availability of our method for the concept. We hope this paper be a powerful approach for building autonomous robots.