Making object learning and recognition an active process

The exploration and learning of new objects is an essential capability of a cognitive robot. In this paper we focus on making use of the robot's manipulation abilities to learn complete object representations suitable for 3D object recognition. Taking control of the object allows the robot to focus on relevant parts of the images, thus bypassing potential pitfalls of purely bottom-up attention and segmentation. The main contribution of the paper consists in integrated visuomotor processes that allow the robot to learn object representations by manipulation without having any prior knowledge about the objects. Our experimental results show that the acquired data is of sufficient quality to train a classifier that can recognize 3D objects independently of the viewpoint.