  In line with the sensorimotor contingency theory, we investigate the problem
of the perception of space from a fundamental sensorimotor perspective. Despite
its pervasive nature in our perception of the world, the origin of the concept
of space remains largely mysterious. For example in the context of artificial
perception, this issue is usually circumvented by having engineers pre-define
the spatial structure of the problem the agent has to face. We here show that
the structure of space can be autonomously discovered by a naive agent in the
form of sensorimotor regularities, that correspond to so called compensable
sensory experiences: these are experiences that can be generated either by the
agent or its environment. By detecting such compensable experiences the agent
can infer the topological and metric structure of the external space in which
its body is moving. We propose a theoretical description of the nature of these
regularities and illustrate the approach on a simulated robotic arm equipped
with an eye-like sensor, and which interacts with an object. Finally we show
how these regularities can be used to build an internal representation of the
sensor's external spatial configuration.
