  Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory
modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or
using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are
displayed by machines to some extent. Yet, the artificial creatures are lagging
behind. The key foundation is an internal representation of the body that the
agent - human, animal, or robot - has developed. The mechanisms of operation of
body models in the brain are largely unknown and even less is known about how
they are constructed from experience after birth. In collaboration with
developmental psychologists, we conducted targeted experiments to understand
how infants acquire first "sensorimotor body knowledge". These experiments
inform our work in which we construct embodied computational models on humanoid
robots that address the mechanisms behind learning, adaptation, and operation
of multimodal body representations. At the same time, we assess which of the
features of the "body in the brain" should be transferred to robots to give
rise to more adaptive and resilient, self-calibrating machines. We extend
traditional robot kinematic calibration focusing on self-contained approaches
where no external metrology is needed: self-contact and self-observation.
Problem formulation allowing to combine several ways of closing the kinematic
chain simultaneously is presented, along with a calibration toolbox and
experimental validation on several robot platforms. Finally, next to models of
the body itself, we study peripersonal space - the space immediately
surrounding the body. Again, embodied computational models are developed and
subsequently, the possibility of turning these biologically inspired
representations into safe human-robot collaboration is studied.
