Imitation learning of motor primitives and language bootstrapping in robots

Abstract— Imitation learning in robots, also called programing by demonstration, has made important advances in recent years, allowing humans to teach context dependant motor skills/tasks to robots. We propose to extend the usual contexts investigated to also include acoustic linguistic expressions that might denote a given motor skill, and thus we target joint learning of the motor skills and their potential acoustic linguistic name. In addition to this, a modification of a class of existing algorithms within the imitation learning framework is made so that they can handle the unlabeled demonstration of several tasks/motor primitives without having to inform the imitator of what task is being demonstrated or what the number of tasks are, which is a necessity for language learning, i.e; if one wants to teach naturally an open number of new motor skills together with their acoustic names. Finally, a mechanism for detecting whether or not linguistic input is relevant to the task is al...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Thomas Cederborg, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
• Keywords: Acoustic Linguistic Expressions, CORR 2010, Education, Motor Skills, Robot