Learning to Communicate Through Imitation in Autonomous Robots

Communication is a desirable skill for robots. We describe a method of how these skills could be learned. A control architecture of connectionist model combining life-long learning and predefined behaviours is developed and implemented in a physical system of two autonomous robots. A teaching scenario based on movement imitation is used to teach a basic non grammatical language. Teaching is done from a teacher robot to a student robot. While following the teacher, the student robot learns a basic vocabulary concerning its movements and location.