A Formal Account of Structuring Motor Actions With Sensory Prediction for a Naive Agent

Abstract

For naive robots to become truly autonomous, they need a means of developing their perceptive capabilities instead of relying on hand crafted models. The sensorimotor contingency theory asserts that such a way resides in learning invariants of the sensorimotor flow. We propose a formal framework inspired by this theory for the description of sensorimotor experiences of a naive agent, extending previous related works. We then use said formalism to conduct a theoretical study where we isolate sufficient conditions for the determination of a sensory prediction function. Furthermore, we also show that algebraic structure found in this prediction can be taken as a proxy for structure on the motor displacements, allowing for the discovery of the combinatorial structure of said displacements. Both these claims are further illustrated in simulations where a toy naive agent determines the sensory predictions of its spatial displacements from its uninterpreted sensory flow, which it then uses to infer the combinatorics of said displacements.