Infants and iCubs: Applying Developmental Psychology to Robot Shaping

Achieving sentient robots will not only require understanding of neuro-models that generate behaviour from structure, but will also need research into the role of development, that is how behaviour determines structure. We emphasise infant sensory-motor development and identify an explicit framework that can guide the design of similar developmental processes in robotics. We show how human development sequences can be mapped on to robotic platforms and how constraints on perception and action can be utilised so that staged behaviour and learning may take place. The growth of increasing competence can be managed by this method of unsupervised shaping by constraints.