Probabilistic model of whole-body motion imitation from partial observations

In this paper, a new mimesis scheme is proposed. This scheme enables for a humanoid to imitate human's motion even though the humanoid cannot see human's whole-body motion and the humanoid has not seen the exactly same motion so far. Mimesis framework is based on continuous hidden Markov model. Viterbi algorithm is applied in order to generate more various motion patterns than the number of existing hidden Markov models. In order to imitate other's motion in a smooth way, a smoothing technique in generation problem is realized. The feasibility of this method is demonstrated by simulation on a 20 degrees of freedom humanoid robot configuration