Dynamic Imitation in a Humanoid Robot through Nonparametric Probabilistic Inference

Abstract

We tackle the problem of learning imitative wholebody motions in a humanoid robot using probabilistic inference in Bayesian networks. Our inference-based approach affords a straightforward method to exploit rich yet uncertain prior information obtained from human motion capture data. Dynamic imitation implies that the robot must interact with its environment and account for forces such as gravity and inertia during imitation. Rather than explicitly modeling these forces and the body of the humanoid as in traditional approaches, we show that stable imitative motion can be achieved by learning a sensorbased representation of dynamic balance. Bayesian networks provide a sound theoretical framework for combining prior kinematic information (from observing a human demonstrator) with prior dynamic information (based on previous experience) to model and subsequently infer motions which, with high probability, will be dynamically stable. By posing the problem as one of inference in a Bayesian network, we show that methods developed for approximate inference can be leveraged to efficiently perform inference of actions. Additionally, by using nonparametric inference and a nonparametric (Gaussian process) forward model, our approach does not make any strong assumptions about the physical environment or the mass and inertial properties of the humanoid robot. We propose an iterative, probabilistically constrained algorithm for exploring the space of motor commands and show that the algorithm can quickly discover dynamically stable actions for whole-body imitation of human motion. Experimental results based on simulation and subsequent execution by a HOAP-2 humanoid robot demonstrate that our algorithm is able to imitate a human performing actions such as squatting and a one-legged balance.