Motion Primitive Discovery in a Humanoid Robot via Self-Organising Maps for Phase Recognition

Engineering notes

Engineering notes will be added by the Robot Papers editorial team.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Understanding the computational basis of action recognition is a central challenge in social cognition as well as in human-robot interaction. Inspired by the Mirror Neuron System (MNS), we propose a two-level architecture for motor primitive discovery and online phase recognition applied to the NICO humanoid robot. At the first level, two Self-Organising Maps (SOMs) learn topographic representations of arm kinematics (A-SOM) and hand kinematics (H-SOM) from simulated trials covering seven motor actions. The maps are trained on non-redundant features identified through hierarchical correlation analysis of motion trajectories. The results show that the two SOMs encode complementary aspects of motor behaviour. At the second level, an Echo State Network (ESN) evaluates whether temporal trajectories of SOM activations, represented by consecutive best-matching units, are sufficient for online recognition of the currently executed movement phase. The results show that SOM-based trajectories preserve the dominant phase-discriminative structure of the movement, while contextual information provides only a secondary refinement. Our contribution is the integration of established SOM and ESN methods within an MNS-inspired architecture for motor primitive representation and online phase recognition. The results are compatible with the computational hypothesis that self-organised motor representations, when temporally integrated, can support accurate online recognition of ongoing movement phases.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

Comments