Our perception of our bodies is not always correct or realistic, as any athlete or fashion-conscious person knows, but it’s a crucial factor in how we behave in society. Your brain is continuously preparing for movement while you play ball or get dressed so that you can move your body without bumping, tripping, or falling.
Humans develop our body models as infants, and robots are starting to do the same. A team at Columbia Engineering revealed today that they have developed a robot that, for the first time, can learn a model of its whole body from scratch without any human aid. The researchers explain how their robot built a kinematic model of itself in a recent paper published in Science Robotics, and how it utilized that model to plan movements, accomplish objectives, and avoid obstacles in a range of scenarios. Even damage to its body was automatically detected and corrected.
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