Towards Imitation Learning of Grasping Movements by an Autonomous Robot

Imitation learning holds the promise of robots which need not be programmed but instead can learn by observing a teacher. We present recent efforts being made at our laboratory towards endowing a robot with the capability of learning to imitate human hand gestures. In particular, we are interested in grasping movements. The aim is a robot that learns, e.g., to pick up a cup at its handle by imitating a human teacher grasping it like this. Our main emphasis is on the computer vision techniques for finding and tracking the human teacher’s grasping fingertips. We present first experiments and discuss limitations of the approach and planned extensions.