A Low-Cost Humanoid Robot with Human Gestures Imitation Capabilities

Sales of entertainment robots are primed to explode in the next few years. Gesture imitation from a human operator demonstration is considered a promising technique that allows unexperienced users to easily interact with a robotic platform. In this paper a Programming by Demonstration system for a humanoid robot is proposed. The robot is a Robosapien V2 toy which is programmed to observe and imitate human gestures. The system combines inputs from multiple sensory devices, including a dataglove, a motion tracker and a monocular vision system. In the proposed imitation approach the sensor data are mapped to the joint space of the robot. Even though the performance of the robot is constrained by the kinematic and dynamic limitations of RSV2 and by the sensor inaccuracies, experiments involving simple gesture imitation of an untrained user show the viability and effectiveness of the method.