A Statistic Model of Embodied Symbol Emergence

Mimesis theory is one of the primitive skill of imitative learning which is regarded as an origin of human intelligence because imitation is fundamental func tion for communication and symbol manipulation When the mimesis is adopted as learning method for humanoids loads for designing full body behavior would be decrease because bottom up learning approaches from robot side and top down teaching approaches from user side involved each other Therefore we propose a behavior acquisition and understanding system for humanoids based on the mime sis theory This system is able to abstract observed others behaviors into symbols to recognize others behavior using the symbols and to generate motion patterns using the symbols In this paper we extend the mimesis model to geometric symbol space which contains relative distance information among symbols We also discuss how to generate complex behavior by geometric symbol manipulation in the symbol space and how to recognize novel behavior using combination of symbols by known symbols Introduction Recently the human behavioral science and the human intelligence have be come conspicuous as a real research issue of robotics Although the moti vation of the arti cial intelligence originated there the physical limitations have forced or justi ed the researchers to carry on their research in a limited scope and scale of complexity It ought to be the major challenge of contem porary robotics to study robotic behaviors and intelligence in the full scale of complexity mutually sharing research outcomes and hypotheses with the human behavioral science and human intelligence The discovery of mirror neurons have been a notable topic of brain sci ence which have been found in primates brain and humans brain re when the subject observes a speci c behavior and also re when the subject start to act the same behavior Furthermore it is located on Broka s area which has close relationship between language management The fact suggests that the behavior recognition process and behavior generation process are combined as the same information processing scheme and the scheme is nothing but a core engine of symbol manipulation ability Indeed in Donald s Mime sis Theory it is said that symbol manipulation and communication