"As Robots Learn to Imitate"IST Results (01/03/05)

The IST-funded MIRROR project has spent three years studying how people recognize and mimic gestures by transferring that ability to a robotic system and observing the results. In the first year of the project, researchers employed a "cyber-glove" to collate visual and motor data that was used to explore the link between vision and action in the identification of hand gestures; the second year involved experiments with monkeys and human infants to determine how visual and motor data can be employed to draw distinctions between grasping actions, and then applying that information to robotic mimicry of simple object-directed actions; the third and final year of MIRROR focused on building a humanoid robot by combining the principles outlined in the previous years. The robot is constructed out of a binocular head, an arm, and a hand with multiple digits; though the device is still incomplete, the researchers believe they have discovered many components of a biologically-interoperable architecture that can be robotically duplicated. "From the robotics point of view, we demonstrated that it is easier to interpret actions performed by others if the system has built a representation of the action during learning," explains MIRROR project coordinator Giulio Sandini. MIRROR consortium members are now working on the FP6 IST RobotCub project, a follow-up effort whose goal is to construct a humanoid platform to investigate how manipulation skills are developed.Click Here to View Full Article