Learning new skills by a humanoid robot through imitation

Abstract

Today's humanoid robots are used in many successful research topics. According to users needs these robots must be able to perform new tasks, and to adapt in a workspace. They have a similar appearance with human body. Thus the meaningful features of an humanoid robots are: the capability to imitate the user behavior, and the ability to learn new skills. In this paper, we propose to develop a robot system based on an humanoid robot that has abilities to learn new user skills by imitating human beings. To achieve this goal, we needed to design and to implement a new framework, which is able to teach an humanoid robot via user demonstration and to imitate movements of the human body. Therefore, the movements of the human body are automatically tracked using the Kinect sensor, and they teleoperate a whole body of a Nao robot. The results of experiments suggest that the feasibility of the proposed system is verified.