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 one is a representation of the body containing information of the body's capabilities. The body percept is a snapshot of the body and its relation with the environment at a given instant. These elements 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