Motor Coordination Learning for Rhythmic Movements

The perspective of ubiquitous robots raises the issue of social acceptance. It is our belief that a successful robot integration relies on adequate social responses. Human social interactions heavily rely on synchrony which leads humans to connect emotionally. It is henceforth, our opinion, that motor coordination mechanisms should be fully integrated to robot controllers, allowing coordination, and thus social synchrony, when required. The aim of the work presented in this paper is to learn motor coordination with a human partner performing rhythmic movements. For that purpose, plastic Central Pattern Generators (CPG) are implemented in the joints of the Pepper robot. Hence, in this paper, we present an adaptive versatile model which can be used for any rhythmic movement and combination of joints. This is demonstrated with various arm movements.