Abstract
Infants imitate behaviour flexibly. Depending on the circumstances, they copy both actions and their effects or only reproduce the demonstrator’s intended goals. In view of this selective imitation, infants have been called rational imitators. The ability to selectively and adaptively imitate behaviour would be a beneficial capacity for robots. Indeed, selecting what to imitate is one of the outstanding unsolved problems in the field of robotic imitation. In this paper, we first present a formalized model of rational imitation suited for robotic applications. Next, we test and demonstrate it using two humanoid robots.
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Notes
- 1.
Therefore, the notation for the planned action sequence, \({\varvec{a}}_t\), could be considered as shorthand for \({\varvec{a}}_t= f({\varvec{s}}, C)\) indicating that the planned action sequence is a function of (1) the currently selected action states (or subgoals) \({\varvec{s}}\) and (2) the physical constraints C experienced by the demonstrator.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by grant EP/L024861/1 (‘Verifiable Autonomy’) from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). All data are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.56272
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Vanderelst, D., Winfield, A.F.T. (2016). Rational Imitation for Robots. In: Tuci, E., Giagkos, A., Wilson, M., Hallam, J. (eds) From Animals to Animats 14. SAB 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9825. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43488-9_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43488-9_6
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