Development of body mapping from human demonstrator to inverted-pendulum mobile robot for imitation

This paper addresses development of body mapping from a human demonstrator to an inverted-pendulum mobile robot for imitation. An inverted-pendulum mobile robot with torso and body links learns a dynamic kicking motion shown by a human. The robot observes the human demonstration with a camera, extracts the human region in each of images, maps the region to its own two links, estimates the link posture trajectories, and starts kicking motion learning based on the trajectory parameters for imitation. The mapping parameter gives an important role for successive imitation. A reasonable and feasible procedure of learning from observation for an inverted-pendulum robot and development of the body mapping is proposed and investigated in this paper.