Teaching Humanoids to Imitate 'Shapes' of Movements

Trajectory formation is one of the basic functions of the neuromotor controller. In particular, reaching, avoiding, controlling impacts (hitting), drawing, dancing and imitating are motion paradigms that result in formation of spatiotemporal trajectories of different degrees of complexity. Transferring some of these skills to humanoids allows us to understand how we ourselves learn, store and importantly, generalize motor behavior (to new contexts). Using the playful scenario of teaching baby humanoid iCub to ‘draw’, the essential set of transformations necessary to enable the student to ‘swiftly’ enact a teachers demonstration are investigated in this paper. A crucial feature in the proposed architecture is that, what iCub learns to imitate is not the teachers ‘end effector trajectories’ but rather their ‘shapes’. The resulting advantages are numerous. The extracted ‘Shape’ being a high level representation of the teachers movement, endows the learnt action natural...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICANN
• Authors: Vishwanathan Mohan, Giorgio Metta, Jacopo Zenzeri, Pietro Morasso
• Keywords: ICANN 2010, ICub, Neural Networks, Neuromotor Controller, Trajectory Formation