Learning From and About Others: Towards Using Imitation to Bootstrap the Social Competence of Robots

We want to build robots capable of rich social interactions with humans, including natural communication and cooperation. This work explores how imitation as a social learning and teaching process may be applied to building socially intelligent robots, and summarizes our progress toward building a robot capable of learning how to imitate facial expressions from simple imitative games played with a human, using biologically inspired mechanisms. Our approach is heavily influenced by the ways human infants learn to communicate with their caregivers and understand the actions of others in intentional terms. Among the key ideas that we draw from work on the development of human social intelligence, the most crucial is the hypothesis that in human infants, imitative interactions, starting with facial mimicry, are a significant stepping-stone in developing appropriate social behavior, learning to predict other’s actions, and ultimately, understanding the intensions of others.