Proprioception and body schema
Minoru Asada · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018
Proprioception is our ability to sense the position of our own limbs and other body parts in space, and body schema is a body representation that allows both biological and artificial agents to execute their actions based on proprioception. The proprioceptive information used by current artificial agents (robots) is mainly related to posture (and its change) and consists of joint angles (joint velocities) given a linked structure. However, the counterpart in biological agents (humans and other animals) includes more complicated components with associated controversies concerning the relationship between the body schema and the body image. A new trend of constructive approaches has been attacking this topic using computational models and robots. This chapter provides an overview of the biology of proprioception and body representation, summarizes the classical use of body schema in robotics, and describes a series of constructive approaches that address some of the mysteries of body representation.