A Real-Time Upper-Body Robot Imitation System

An upper-body robot imitation (UBRI) system is proposed and developed to enable the human upper body imitation by a humanoid robot in real time. To achieve the imitation of arm motions, a geometry-based analytical method is presented and applied to extracting the joint angles of the human and mapping to the robot. Comparing to the traditional numerical methods of inverse kinematic computations, the geometrical analysis method generates a lower computational cost and maintains good imitation similarity. To map the human head motions to the head of the humanoid robot, a face tracking algorithm is employed to recognize the human face and track the human head poses in real time. A hand extraction and hand state recognition algorithm is proposed to achieve the hand motion mapping. At last, the completion rate and similarity evaluation experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed UBRI system.