Robot Imitation from Human Body Movements

Imitation represents a useful and promising alternative to programming robots. The approach presented here is based on two functional elements used by humans to understand and perform actions. These elements are: the body schema and the body percept. The first o ne is a representation of the body containing information of the body's capabilities. The bod y percept is a snapshot of the body and its relation with the environment at a given instant. These e lements are believed to interact between each other generating among other abilities, the ability to imitate. This paper presents our approach to robot imitation and experimental results, where a robot is able to imitate the movements of a human demonstrator via its visual observations.