Robot learning of upper-body human motion by active imitation

This paper presents a general architecture that allows a humanoid robot to imitate upper-body movements of a human demonstrator. This architecture integrates a mechanism to memorize novel behaviours executed by a human demonstrator, with a module to recognize and generate its own interpretation of already observed behaviours. Our imitator includes three biologically plausible components: i) an attention mechanism to autonomously extract relevant information from the visual input; ii) a supra-modal representation of the motion of observed body parts to map visual and motor domains; and iii) an active imitation module which involves the motor systems in the behaviour recognition process. Experimental results with a real humanoid robot demonstrate the ability of the proposed architecture to acquire novel behaviours and to recognize and reproduce previously memorized ones