Infant simulator with an embodied caregiver: Generating infant-perspective touch and vision during social interaction

Abstract:Early development unfolds in caregiver-infant dyads, where infants' sensorimotor streams are shaped by physical contact and face-to-face interaction. Yet developmental robotics simulators commonly model infants in isolation, limiting the study of caregiver-mediated experience. We present a caregiver-enabled extension of the Multi-Modal Infant Model (MIMo) in MuJoCo that turns MIMo into a controllable platform for replaying dyadic interaction and generating dense infant-perspective observations. The system provides (i) an articulated caregiver model compatible with MIMo morphologies, parameterized from anthropometrics and optionally resized to a recorded caregiver; (ii) a workflow to replay naturalistic caregiver-infant holding and soothing interactions; and (iii) logging and visualizing the infant's first-person multimodal experience (we show touch and vision). We showcase the tool on touch by introducing origin-aware contact logging that disambiguates self-, caregiver-, and environment-generated contact and supports aggregation into touch-rate statistics comparable to manual coding. While we showcase tactile analysis, the platform is intended more broadly as a generator of multimodal dyadic datasets (touch and egocentric vision) for modeling the development of social interaction.

Robotics (cs.RO)

I.2.9; I.6.5; I.6.3

arXiv:2610.05997 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.05997v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.05997 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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