Seamless Integration and Coordination of Cognitive Skills in Humanoid Robots: A Deep Learning Approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a deep learning model that enables humanoid robots to seamlessly integrate perception, intention reading, and action coordination, demonstrating improved generalization and internal hierarchical representations in synthetic experiments.

Contribution

The study introduces a hierarchical deep dynamic neural network that integrates multiple cognitive skills in humanoid robots through end-to-end learning of visuomotor streams.

Findings

Model learns to read human gestures and generate goal-directed actions

Achieves seamless coordination of perception, decision-making, and action

Develops coherent hierarchical internal representations

Abstract

This study investigates how adequate coordination among the different cognitive processes of a humanoid robot can be developed through end-to-end learning of direct perception of visuomotor stream. We propose a deep dynamic neural network model built on a dynamic vision network, a motor generation network, and a higher-level network. The proposed model was designed to process and to integrate direct perception of dynamic visuomotor patterns in a hierarchical model characterized by different spatial and temporal constraints imposed on each level. We conducted synthetic robotic experiments in which a robot learned to read human's intention through observing the gestures and then to generate the corresponding goal-directed actions. Results verify that the proposed model is able to learn the tutored skills and to generalize them to novel situations. The model showed synergic coordination of perception, action and decision making, and it integrated and coordinated a set of cognitive skills including visual perception, intention reading, attention switching, working memory, action preparation and execution in a seamless manner. Analysis reveals that coherent internal representations emerged at each level of the hierarchy. Higher-level representation reflecting actional intention developed by means of continuous integration of the lower-level visuo-proprioceptive stream.