Construction of Robotic Body Schema by Extracting Temporal Information from Sensory Inputs

This paper proposes a method that incrementally develops the "body schema" of a robot. The method has three features: 1) estimation of light-sensor positions based on the Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) of signals and multidimensional scaling (MDS); 2) incremental update of the estimation; and 3) no additional equipment. We carried out simulation experiments in which a mobile robot moves around environments or follows another robot. Each robot has several light sensors that collect data from which cross-correlation functions are derived and the TDOA is computed. Experimental results show that our method can estimate the positions of sensors deployed on the body and identify the sensors on the same part of the body.