Active inference body perception and action for humanoid robots

Understand

Providing artificial agents with the same computational models of biological systems is a way to understand how intelligent behaviours may emerge.

• We present an active inference body perception and action model working for the first time in a humanoid robot.
• The model relies on the free energy principle proposed for the brain, where both perception and action goal is to minimise the prediction error through gradient descent on the variational free energy bound.
• The body state (latent variable) is inferred by minimising the difference between the observed (visual and proprioceptive) sensor values and the predicted ones.