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7 - The question of ‘what to imitate’: inferring goals and intentions from demonstrations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 December 2009

By
Malinda Carpenter  and
Josep Call
Edited by
Chrystopher L. Nehaniv  and
Kerstin Dautenhahn
Malinda Carpenter
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
Josep Call
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
Chrystopher L. Nehaniv
Affiliation:
University of Hertfordshire
Kerstin Dautenhahn
Affiliation:
University of Hertfordshire
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Summary

Getting a robot to imitate is a difficult task. Currently, researchers are tackling difficult issues such as the ‘correspondence problem’ (Nehaniv and Dautenhahn, 2002) of how to map different aspects of a demonstration to one's own imitative response, how to decide whom, when and what to imitate, and how to evaluate success (Dautenhahn and Nehaniv, 2002a, b). From our perspective, the most interesting of these issues is the question of what to imitate, that is, which aspects of a demonstration robots should copy. This is because in many situations, instead of copying others' actions and their results on the environment exactly, it is often more useful to extract and adopt the goal of the demonstrator's actions, and only copy the actions and results of the demonstrator if they are intended and relevant or essential to the task.

To illustrate, imagine the following scenarios. A robot is presented with the following demonstration and then told to imitate.

  1. (1) An actor approaches a lever and pushes it with his foot.

  2. Here, copying the actor's action and its result might be appropriate: the robot should also push the lever with its foot (assuming it has one).

  3. (2) An actor whose arms are broken pushes the lever with his foot.

  4. Now it might be more appropriate for the robot to use a different action to achieve the same result: it could push the lever with its hands (assuming it has them), as the constraint of not having usable hands – the normal thing to use to push things – does not apply to it.

  5. […]

Type
Chapter
Information
Imitation and Social Learning in Robots, Humans and Animals
Behavioural, Social and Communicative Dimensions
 , pp. 135 - 152
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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