  Sensorimotor contingency theory offers a promising account of the nature of
perception, a topic rarely addressed in the robotics community. We propose a
developmental framework to address the problem of the autonomous acquisition of
sensorimotor contingencies by a naive robot. While exploring the world, the
robot internally encodes contingencies as predictive models that capture the
structure they imply in its sensorimotor experience. Three preliminary
applications are presented to illustrate our approach to the acquisition of
perceptive abilities: discovering the environment, discovering objects, and
discovering a visual field.
