A Developmental Approach for low-level Imitations

Historically, a lot of authors in psychology and in robotics tend to separate “true imitation” and its related high-level mechanisms which seem to be exclusive to human adult, from low-level imitations or “mimicries” observed on babies or primates. Closely, classical researches suppose that an imitative artificial system must be able to build a model of the demonstrator’s geometry, in order to reproduce finely the movements on each joints. Conversely, we will advocate that if imitation is viewed as a part of a developmental course, then (1) an artificial developing system does not need to build any internal model of the other, to perform real-time and low-level imitations of human movements despite the related correspondence problem between man and robot and, (2) a simple sensory-motor loop could be at the basis of multiples heterogeneous imitative behaviors often explained in the literature by different models.