Towards a platform-independent cooperative human-robot interaction system: II. Perception, execution and imitation of goal directed actions

Abstract—Robots should be capable of interacting in a coop-erative and adaptive manner with their human counterparts in open-ended tasks that can change in real-time. An important as-pect of the robot behavior will be the ability to acquire new knowl-edge of the cooperative tasks by observing and interacting with hu-mans. The current research addresses this challenge. We present results from a cooperative human–robot interaction system that has been specifically developed for portability between different humanoid platforms, by abstraction layers at the perceptual and motor interfaces. In the perceptual domain, the resulting system is demonstrated to learn to recognize objects and to recognize actions as sequences of perceptual primitives, and to transfer this learning, and recognition, between different robotic platforms. For execu-tion, composite actions and plans are shown to be learnt on one robot and executed successfully on a different one. Most impor