Body mapping from human demonstrator to inverted-pendulum mobile robot for learning from observation

This paper proposes a method for learning the kicking motion of an inverted-pendulum mobile robot from the observation of a human player's demonstration. An inverted-pendulum mobile robot with upper and lower body links observes the human demonstration with a motion capture system and estimates the posture of each human links. The robot maps the links to its own two links and estimates link posture trajectories during the kicking motion. The robot starts learning kicking based on the trajectory parameters for imitation. Through this process, our robot can learn dynamic kicking shown by a human. The mapping gives an important role for successive imitation. A reasonable and feasible procedure of learning from observation for an inverted-pendulum robot is proposed. Learning performance from observation is investigated with a preliminary experiment.