A Short Introduction to Sensorimotor Perception in Robotics

A new approach to perception in Robotics, whose originality is to be redesigned in an exclusively sensorimotor framework, is presented in this paper. Such an approach is receiving increasing interest within the research community from various disciplines, such as physics, mathematics, cognitive sciences and computational neuroscience. In this context, Robotics might constitute a particularly well-suited experimental testbed and an ideal framework to hatch new ideas about one of the most amazing -and yet very mysterious - faculties of animals and humans. This paper focuses first on the works by Poincaré on the perception of space geometry (and more specifically on its dimension) by sensorimotor means. Current works directly inspired from them are also highlighted. Then, other contributions trying to extend these ideas to the sensorimotor representation of space are introduced. The question of the body representation, and the way the motivation problematic can be formalized in this sensorimotor context, are both partially addressed. This short introduction has been made with the hope to constitute a good opening to the current understanding of the perception sensorimotor framework.