From exploration to imitation: using learnt internal models to imitate others

We present an architecture that enables asocial and social learning mechanisms to be combined in a unified framework on a robot. The robot learns two kinds of internal models by interacting with the environment with no a priori knowledge of its own motor system: internal object models are learnt about how its motor system and other objects appear in its sensor data; internal control models are learnt by babbling and represent how the robot controls objects. These asocially-learnt models of the robot’s motor system are used to understand the actions of a human demonstrator on objects that they can both interact with. Knowledge acquired through self-exploration is therefore used as a bootstrapping mechanism to understand others and benefit from their knowledge.