Imitation: learning and communication

This paper focuses on our works on imitation in autonomous robots. In a first part, we take into account recent studies in the field of developmental psychology and consider the two functions of imitation (learning and communication) that these studies have stressed. In a second part, we propose the idea that a proto imitative behavior can be induced in a mobile robot via a limitation of its visual perception. We provide a robotic implementation in which a mobile robot recognizes its teacher's image. Finally, we discuss imitation in a non-supervised context and we propose a simple system which learns motor associations with non explicit reinforcement on the basis of its ability to detect novelty.

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