Prediction is an important task in robot motor control where it is used to gain feedback for a controller. With such a self-generated
feedback, which is available before sensor readings from an environment can be processed, a controller can be stabilized and
thus the performance of a moving robot in a real-world environment is improved. So far, only experiments with artificially
generated data have shown good results. In a sequence of experiments we evaluate whether a liquid state machine in combination
with a supervised learning algorithm can be used to predict ball trajectories with input data coming from a video camera mounted
on a robot participating in the RoboCup. This pre-processed video data is fed into a recurrent spiking neural network. Connections
to some output neurons are trained by linear regression to predict the position of a ball in various time steps ahead. Our
results support the idea that learning with a liquid state machine can be applied not only to designed data but also to real,
noisy data.
Authors are listed in alphabetical order.