  We present a general framework to autonomously achieve a task, where autonomy
is acquired by learning sensorimotor patterns of a robot, while it is
interacting with its environment. To accomplish the task, using the learned
sensorimotor contingencies, our approach predicts a sequence of actions that
will lead to the desirable observations. Gaussian processes (GP) with automatic
relevance determination is used to learn the sensorimotor mapping. In this way,
relevant sensory and motor components can be systematically found in
high-dimensional sensory and motor spaces. We propose an incremental GP
learning strategy, which discerns between situations, when an update or an
adaptation must be implemented. RRT* is exploited to enable long-term planning
and generating a sequence of states that lead to a given goal; while a
gradient-based search finds the optimum action to steer to a neighbouring state
in a single time step. Our experimental results prove the successfulness of the
proposed framework to learn a joint space controller with high data dimensions
(10$\times$15). It demonstrates short training phase (less than 12 seconds),
real-time performance and rapid adaptations capabilities.
