Representation, Recognition and Generation of Actions in the Context of Imitation Learning

The paper deals with the development of a cognitive architecture for learning by imitation in which a rich conceptual representation of the observed actions is built. We adopt the paradigm of conceptual spaces, in which static and dynamic entities are employed to efficiently organize perceptual data, to recognize positional relations, to learn movements from human demonstration and to generate complex actions by combining and sequencing simpler ones. The aim is to have a robotic system able to effectively learn by imitation and which has the capabilities of deeply understanding the perceived actions to be imitated. Experimentation has been performed on a robotic system composed of a PUMA 200 industrial manipulator and an anthropomorphic robotic hand.