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

Noemi Vaculinova; Matej Hoffmann

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arXiv · 2610.05997

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

Noemi Vaculinova·Matej Hoffmann

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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.

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Noemi Vaculinova, Matej Hoffmann. 2026-10-05. Infant simulator with an embodied caregiver: Generating infant-perspective touch and vision during social interaction. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05997

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