Yiannis Demiris at Imperial College London has extended iCub's humanoid robot motor babbling program into an imitation learning system.
NewScientist discusses humanoid robot research in the article Me, myself and iCub: Meet the robot with a self, in which research of Dr Yiannis Demiris, head of Personal Robotics Lab at Imperial College London, is mentioned.
Your ability to interpret another person's actions using your own body schema is partly down to mirror neurons – cells in your brain that fire when you perform a given movement and when you see someone else perform it. Using this insight, Yiannis Demiris at Imperial College London has extended iCub's motor babbling program into an imitation learning system. As a result, iCub can rapidly acquire new hand gestures, and learn sequences of actions involved in playing games or solving puzzles, simply by watching people perform these tasks. The system will have to be extended further to achieve empathy, so that iCub recognises and mirrors a person's emotional state as well as their movement.
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Ildar Farkhatdinov
Department of Bioengineering
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