Movement imitation mechanisms in robots and humans

Abstract

Imitation mechanisms in artificial and biological agents are of great interest mainly for two reasons: from the engineering point of view, they allow the agent to efficiently utilise the knowledge of other agents in its social environment in order to quickly learn how to perform new tasks; from the scientific point of view, these mechanisms are in triguing since they require the integration of information from the visual, memory, and motor systems.This thesis presents a dual-route architecture for movement imitation and considers its plausibility as a computational model of primate movement imitation First of all, I would like to thank Gillian Hayes for her continuous support and en couragement as my supervisor during my PhD years, and