Goal-Directed Imitation in a Humanoid Robot

Abstract

Our work aims at developing a robust discriminant controller for robot programming by demonstration. It addresses two core issues of imitation learning, namely “what to imitate” and “how to imitate”. This paper presents a method by which a robot extracts the goals of a demonstrated task and determines the imitation strategy that satisfies best these goals. The method is validated in a humanoid platform, taking inspiration of an influential experiment from developmental psychology.