Matthias Rolf, Jochen Steil, Michael Gienger, "Online Goal Babbling for rapid bootstrapping of inverse models in high dimensions", IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL) and on Epigenetic Robotics (EpiRob), 2011.

We present a model of online Goal Babbling for the bootstrapping of sensorimotor coordination. By modeling infants’ early goal-directed movements we can show that inverse models can be bootstrapped within a few hundred movements even in very high-dimensional sensorimotor spaces. Our model thereby explains how infants might initially acquire reaching skills without the need for exhaustive exploration, and how robots can do so in a feasible way. We show that online learning in a closed loop with exploration allows significant speed-ups of the bootstrapping and outperforms batch-gradient learning by orders of magnitudes.