A Mechatronic Platform for Behavioral Studies on Infants Fabrizio Taffoni, Domenico Formica, Alessandro Zompanti, Marco Mirolli, Gianluca Balsassarre, Flavio Keller, Eugenio Guglielmelli Abstract— In this article the design and fabrication of a new mechatronic platform (called “Mechatronic Board”) for behavioral analysis of children are presented and discussed. The platform is the result of a multidisciplinary design approach which merges input coming from neuroscientists, psychologists, roboticians and bioengineers, with the main goal of studying learning mechanisms driven by intrinsic motivations and curios- ity. A detailed analysis of the main features of the mechatronic board is provided, focusing on the key aspects which allow studying intrinsically motivated learning in children. Finally preliminary results on curiosity-driven learning, coming from a pilot study on children are reported I. INTRODUCTION The acquisition of new skills and know-how is one of the most astonishing behavior which could be observed in humans and animal models. The driving force that shapes this process is unknown. Children seem to acquire new skills and know-how in a continuous and open-ended manner [1]. Before developing tool-use ability, for example, children show typical exploratory behaviors based on trial and error which could be considered as a self generated opportunities for perceptual learning [2]. Most important, this process is not goal directed but it seems to be completely spontaneous and not related to the context. According to [3], this process follows a well defined path strictly linked to the development of cognitive and morphological structures, which are related to the new acquired skills (e.g. tool use). How children learn to use these skills in a different context to reach a specific goal is unknown. To study which is the driving force that shape exploratory behaviors underling learning processes in humans, we design a new mechatronic tool for behavioral analysis (called “mechatronic board”). The new platform should allow to test if exploratory actions, which are not instrumental to achieve any specific goal, improve This work has received funding from the European Community’s Sev- enth Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013, ”Challenge 2 - Cognitive Systems, Interaction, Robotics”, under grant agreement No FP7-ICT-IP- 231722, project ”IM-CLeVeR - Intrinsically Motivated Cumulative Learning Versatile Robots”. F. Taffoni, D. Formica, A. Zompanti, and E. Guglielmelli are with Laboratory of Biomedical Robotics and Biomi- crosystems, Universit` a Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, via ´ Alvaro del Portillo 21, 00128 Roma - Italy {f.taffoni, d.formica, e.guglielmelli}@unicampus.it; alessandrozompanti@gmail.com F. Keller is with the Laboratory of developmental Neuroscience, Univer- sit` a Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, via ´ Alvaro del Portillo 21, 00128 Roma - Italy f.keller@unicampus.it M. Mirolli and G. Baldassarre are with the Laboratory of Com- putational Embodied Neuroscience, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, via San Martino della Battaglia 44, 00185 Roma -Italy {gianluca.baldassarre, marco.mirolli@istc.cnr.it } participants capacity in solving a subsequent goal-directed task, which requires the proficiency acquired during free exploration. This study is part of the European Project Intrin- sically Motivated Cumulative Learning Versatile Robots (IM- CLeVeR). The main goal of this project is to study learning strategies based on curiosity and novelty detection in children and animal models, modeling such strategies, and replicate them on a humanoid robot (the iCub system developed at IIT as part of the EU project RobotCub see www.iCub.org) which has the anthropometric measures of a 3 years old child. II. THE MECHATRONIC PLATFORM A. Functional Specification The mechatronic board is an innovative device specifically designed for research on intrinsically motivated cumulative learning in children. This platform has been designed to be modular and easily reconfigurable, allowing to customize the experimental setup according to different protocols devised for children. A similar platform has been also developed for comparative studies on animal models [4]. The board should promote both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated actions that is, respectively, curiosity driven and rewarded actions. It should embed non-intrusive ecological technologies small and light enough to fit the objects that will be manipulated. To allow different possibility of interactions, the board should be equipped by instrumented interchangeable objects stimulating different kinds of manipulative behaviours and allowing to record several kinds of actions (e.g. rotations, pushing, pulling, repetitive hand movements, button pressing, etc). It should be also provided of a system for multimodal stimuli generation and a system for reward delivering when a set of reprogrammable actions is performed. Finally it should be made of materials, mechanism, and electronic components robust and safe enough for children. B. First Prototype The first prototype of the mechatronic platform is com- posed of (i) a planar base ( 650x500x450 mm) provided of three slots (180x180 mm) where push-buttons or different mechatronic modules can be easily plugged in; (ii) a reward releasing unit (650x120x400 mm) mounted on the back area of the planar base and containing the reward boxes where rewards are placed by the experimenter. The boxes are made by transparent material, so that the partecipants can always see what is inside; (iii) a system for stimuli and reward generation: the whole platform is provided by a set of different stimuli (acoustic and visual) to provide The Fourth IEEE RAS/EMBS International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics Roma, Italy. June 24-27, 2012 978-1-4577-1198-5/12/$26.00 ©2012 IEEE 1874