Extraction of primitive representation from captured human movements and measured ground reaction force to generate physically consistent imitated behaviors

In this paper, we propose an imitation learning framework to generate physically consistent behaviors by estimating the ground reaction force from captured human behaviors. In the proposed framework, we first extract behavioral primitives, which are represented by linear dynamical models, from captured human movements and measured ground reaction force by using the Gaussian mixture of linear dynamical models. Therefore, our method has small dependence on classification criteria defined by an experimenter. By switching primitives with different combinations while estimating the ground reaction force, different physically consistent behaviors can be generated. We apply the proposed method to a four-link robot model to generate squat motion sequences. The four-link robot model successfully generated the squat movements by using our imitation learning framework. To show generalization performance, we also apply the proposed method to robot models that have different torso weights and lengths from a human demonstrator and evaluate the control performances. In addition, we show that the robot model is able to recognize and imitate demonstrator movements even when the observed movements are deviated from the movements that are used to construct the primitives. For further evaluation in higher-dimensional state space, we apply the proposed method to a seven-link robot model. The seven-link robot model was able to generate squat-and-sway motions by using the proposed framework. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.