Goal babbling: a new concept for early sensorimotor exploration

The human body possesses more than 600 skeletal mus-cles [1]. Performing purposeful actions to achieve some be-havioral goal requires a high degree of coordination of these many degrees of freedom. Yet, human infants are born without the most basic coordination skills like reaching for an object [2], which poses the learning of sensorimotor coordination as a fundamental problem in human development. Understanding this ability to learn, and utilizing it for modern robotics systems is one of the major goals of the research fields of cognitive [3] and developmental robotics [4], [5]. We investigate the learning of reaching skills as an exem-plary coordination skill. The problem of reaching is to find motor commands (e.g. joint angles of a robot arm) that move the hand, or the robot’s end-effector towards some desired position in space. Thereby motor commands q and outcome