The predictive functions that permit humans to infer their body state by
sensorimotor integration are critical to perform safe interaction in complex
environments. These functions are adaptive and robust to non-linear actuators
and noisy sensory information. This paper introduces a computational perceptual
model based on predictive processing that enables any multisensory robot to
learn, infer and update its body configuration when using arbitrary sensors
with Gaussian additive noise. The proposed method integrates different sources
of information (tactile, visual and proprioceptive) to drive the robot belief
to its current body configuration. The motivation is to enable robots with the
embodied perception needed for self-calibration and safe physical human-robot
interaction.
We formulate body learning as obtaining the forward model that encodes the
sensor values depending on the body variables, and we solve it by Gaussian
process regression. We model body estimation as minimizing the discrepancy
between the robot body configuration belief and the observed posterior. We
minimize the variational free energy using the sensory prediction errors
(sensed vs expected).
In order to evaluate the model we test it on a real multisensory robotic arm.
We show how different sensor modalities contributions, included as additive
errors, improve the refinement of the body estimation and how the system adapts
itself to provide the most plausible solution even when injecting strong
sensory visuo-tactile perturbations. We further analyse the reliability of the
model when different sensor modalities are disabled. This provides grounded
evidence about the correctness of the perceptual model and shows how the robot
estimates and adjusts its body configuration just by means of sensory
information.

该研究提出了一种计算感知模型，基于预测处理，能够使任何多感官机器人通过使用任意具有高斯加性噪声的传感器来学习、推断和更新其身体配置，从而实现自我校准和安全的人机物理交互。