Reproduction of human arm movements using Kinect-based motion capture data

Transferring skills from humans to robots is an appealing way for teaching artificial systems to perform a variety of different tasks. In this context, imitation learning appears as an important approach for teaching robots due to the generation of human-like movements and the ease of teaching new tasks. This paper addresses the use of a Kinect-based human motion capture system and the reproduction of arm movements in an upper-body humanoid robot. The objectives are threefold: (1) to deal with the lack of a kinematics model that assure coherence in the recorded 3D human poses; (2) to explore the inclusion of a shoulder complex based on a parallel mechanism; and (3) to demonstrate and evaluate how two robot models can be used to reproduce the human demonstrations. Several experimental results are included showing the upper-limb reproduction of human arm movements.