Enabling real-time full-body imitation: a natural way of transferring human movement to humanoids

We seek intuitive, efficient ways to create and direct human-like behaviors for humanoid robots. Here we present a method to enable humanoid robots to acquire movements by imitation. The robot uses 3D vision to perceive the movements of a human teacher, and then estimates the teacher's body postures using a fast full-body inverse kinematics method that incorporates a kinematic model of the teacher. This solution is then mapped to the robot and reproduced in real-time. The robustness of the method is tested on a 30-degree-of-freedom Sarcos humanoid robot located at ATR using 3D vision data from external cameras and from head-mounted cameras.