Real-time imitation human upper-body movement with joint and self-collision constraints

Imitation or programming by demonstration from humans is a kind of effective method for robots to learn human´s behaviors. This paper proposes a task-prior algorithm to solve the physical kinematic constraints of a full-body humanoid robot on real-time imitation. Redundant kinematic system is built to track the trajectory of the wrist position as a primary task. In the meanwhile, joint velocity limits and self-collision avoidance are introduced into the null space as additional tasks. Experiments on both simulation and a full-body humanoid are designed to verify the validity of the final policy.With the proposed method, the full-body humanoid robot succeeds in imitating humans´ movement with Kinect sensor and comparison between with and without considering the constraints are making to show the necessaries of this algorithm.