Learning from Examples: Imitation Learning and Emerging Cognition

Abstract

In contrast to traditional robots, future humanoid robots will not be explicitly programmed to accomplish new tasks in the real world. Instead they will acquire new skills by imitating human behavior. Learning new skills by imitation is a core and fundamental part of human learning, and a great challenge for humanoid robots. This chapter presents mechanisms of imitation learning, which contribute to the emergence of new robot behavior. We first give a detailed description of the general scientific insights underlying the imitation capability of humans. We present a learning model of the mirror neuron system enabling a humanoid robot to imitate first-seen human motions. Then we make further considerations regarding embodiment.