Humanoid Robot's Autonomous Acquisition of Proto-Symbols through Motion Segmentation

Mimesis is the theory that human intelligence originated in the interactive communication of motion recognition and generation through imitation. A mimesis model has been proposed using hidden Markov models (HMMs), which represent proto symbols. In our previous system, the user had to manually divided a sequence of motion into segments in order to embed each segment as an HMM. Automatic segmentation is essential for a system to autonomously learn and develop through imitation. In this paper, we propose an automatic motion segmentation method utilizing correlation among movements for a short time period. In addition, we show that it is possible to acquire proto symbols by providing the automatically segmented motion patterns with the mimesis system