Robot See , Robot Do : An Overview of Robot Imitation Paul Bakker

There are currently two major approaches to robot teaching: explicitly tell the robot what to do (programming) or let the robot gure it out for itself (reinforcement learning/genetic algorithms). In this paper we give an overview of a new approach, in which the robot instead learns novel behaviours by observing the behaviour of others: imitation learning. We summarize the psychological background of this approach, propose a de nition of imitation, and identify the important issues involved in implementing imitation in robotic systems. Based on this framework, we review recent published work in this area, and describe an imitation project currently underway at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Japan.