Insertion of pause in drawing from babbling for robot's developmental imitation learning

In this paper, we present a method to improve a robot's imitation performance in a drawing scenario by inserting pauses in motion. Human's drawing skills are said to develop through five stages: 1) Scribbling, 2) Fortuitous Realism, 3) Failed Realism, 4) Intellectual Realism, and 5) Visual Realism. We focus on stages 1) and 3) for creating our system, each corresponding to body babbling and imitation learning, respectively. For stage 1), the robot randomly moves its arm to associate robot's arm dynamics with the drawing result. Presuming that the robot has no knowledge about its own dynamics, the robot learns its body dynamics in this stage. For stage 3), we consider a scenario where a robot would imitate a human's drawing motion. Upon creating the system, we focus on the motionese phenomenon, which is one of the key factors for discussing acquisition of a skill through a human parent-child interaction. In motionese, the parent would first show each action elaborately to the child, when teaching a skill. As the child starts to improve, the parent's actions would be simplified. Likewise in our scenario, the human would first insert pauses during the drawing motions where the direction of drawing changes (i.e. corners). As the robot's imitation learning of drawing converges, the human would change to drawing without pauses. The experimental results show that insertion of pause in drawing imitation scenarios greatly improves the robot's drawing performance.