Development of Object and Grasping Knowledge by Robot Exploration

We describe a bootstrapping cognitive robot system that-mainly based on pure exploration-acquires rich object representations and associated object-specific grasp affordances. Such bootstrapping becomes possible by combining innate competences and behaviors by which the system gradually enriches its internal representations, and thereby develops an increasingly mature interpretation of the world and its ability to act within it. We compare the system's prior competences and developmental progress with human innate competences and developmental stages of infants.