Robotic Societies: Elements of Learning by Imitation

Imitation enables the individuals to acquire new abilities, and encourages social interaction and cultural transfer. The capability to obtain new abilities by observation represents many important advantages. Although imitation intends to equip robots with social skills, most of the approaches so far only focus on the development of a mechanism to imitate, and other issues that contribute to the whole process of imitation are usually ignored. This paper presents the major elements that are embedded in the process of imitation, and aims to offer a complete framework to address imitation. Experimental results at the first stage with the framework are presented, as well as results using attention process into the perception process.