Teaching a Humanoid Robot to Recognize and Reproduce Social Cues

In a Robot Programming by Demonstration framework, several demonstrations of a task are required to generalize and reproduce the task under different circumstances. To teach a task to the robot, explicit pointers are required to signal the start/end of a demonstration and to switch between the learning/reproduction phases. Coordination of the learning system can be achieved by adding social cues to the interaction process. Here, we propose to use an imitation game to teach a humanoid robot to recognize communicative gestures, which then serve as social signals in a pointing-at-objects scenario. The system is based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and use motion sensors to track the user's gestures.