Human arm motion imitation by a humanoid robot

The objective of this work is the development of a system capable to control the arm movement of a robot by mimicking the gestures of an actor captured by a markerless vision sensor. The Kinect for Xbox is used to recuperate angle information at the level of the actor's arm and an interaction module transforms it into a usable format for real-time robot arm control. To avoid self-collisions, the distance between the two arms is computed in real-time and the motion is not executed if this distance becomes smaller the twice the diameter of the member. The interfacing issues are discussed and a software architecture is proposed and implemented for this purpose. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated on a NAO robot.