As robots learn to imitate

Can robots learn to communicate by studying and imitating humans' gestures? That's what MIRROR's researchers aimed to find out by studying how infants and monkeys learn complex acts such as grasping and transferring it to robots.
"Our main motivation for the project was to advance the understanding of how humans recognise and imitate gestures," says Professor Giulio Sandini, coordinator of the three-year IST-funded project, MIRROR. "We did that by building an artificial system that can learn to communicate by means of body gestures."