Feature extraction of robot sensor data using factor analysis for behavior learning

The paper addresses feature extraction of sensor data for robot behavior learning using factor analysis. Redundancies in sensor types and quantities are common in sensing competence of robots. The redundancies cause the high dimensionality of the perceptual space. It is impractical to incorporate all available sensor information in decision-making and learning of robots due to the huge memory and computational requirements. This paper proposes a new approach to extract important knowledge from sensor data based on the inter-correlation of sensor data using factor analysis and construct logical perceptual space for robot behavior learning. The logical perceptual space is constructed by hypothetical latent factors extracted using factor analysis. Since the latent factors extracted have fewer dimensions than raw sensor data, using the logical perceptual space in behavior learning would significantly simplify the learning process and architecture. Experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the process of logical perceptual space extraction from ultrasonic range data for robot behavior learning.