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Parental scaffolding as a bootstrapping mechanism for learning grasp affordances and imitation skills

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 August 2014

Emre Ugur ,
Yukie Nagai ,
Hande Celikkanat  and
Erhan Oztop
Emre Ugur*
Affiliation:
Institute of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute, Kyoto, Japan
Yukie Nagai
Affiliation:
Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan
Hande Celikkanat
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Turkey
Erhan Oztop
Affiliation:
Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute, Kyoto, Japan Department of Computer Science, Ozyegin University, Istanbul, Turkey
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: emre.ugur@uibk.ac.at
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Summary

Parental scaffolding is an important mechanism that speeds up infant sensorimotor development. Infants pay stronger attention to the features of the objects highlighted by parents, and their manipulation skills develop earlier than they would in isolation due to caregivers' support. Parents are known to make modifications in infant-directed actions, which are often called “motionese”7. The features that might be associated with motionese are amplification, repetition and simplification in caregivers' movements, which are often accompanied by increased social signalling. In this paper, we extend our previously developed affordances learning framework to enable our hand-arm robot equipped with a range camera to benefit from parental scaffolding and motionese. We first present our results on how parental scaffolding can be used to guide the robot learning and to modify its crude action execution to speed up the learning of complex skills. For this purpose, an interactive human caregiver-infant scenario was realized with our robotic setup. This setup allowed the caregiver's modification of the ongoing reach and grasp movement of the robot via physical interaction. This enabled the caregiver to make the robot grasp the target object, which in turn could be used by the robot to learn the grasping skill. In addition to this, we also show how parental scaffolding can be used in speeding up imitation learning. We present the details of our work that takes the robot beyond simple goal-level imitation, making it a better imitator with the help of motionese.

Keywords

Developmental roboticsAffordanceImitationParental scaffoldingMotionese
Type
Articles
Information
Robotica , Volume 33 , Special Issue 5: Robotics in the Alpe-Adria-Danube Region (RAAD 2013) , June 2015 , pp. 1163 - 1180
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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