Why should we imitate robots? (Extended Abstract)

Previous research in HRI have shown that human’s subjective evaluation of robot’s abilities aect the way people interact with robots. Given that one of the major challenges in learning from demonstration in robotics is the limited number of training examples that the demonstrator is usually willing to provide, it would be benecial to design the interaction context in such a way to increase human’s subjective evaluation of the robot’s imitative skills. We propose back imitation as a way to achieve that goal. This paper reports the results of a preliminary study that was conducted to evaluate the eect of back imitation on human’s subjective evaluation of the robot along several dimensions including imitation skill, motion human likeness, interaction quality, humanness and likability.