11th ASME Biennial Conference on Engineering Systems Design and Analysis, (ESDA 2012), Nantes, France, 2 - 04 July 2012, pp.361-370
Imitation learning is one of the forms of social learning that enables the human or robot agents to learn new skills. The knowledge acquired for imitation can be basically represented as action mapping based on "organ matching" which determines the correspondence between imitator and imitatee, if the imitator and the demonstrator share the same embodiment. In this paper; we aim at imitation of two system with totally different dynamics, imitating each other, where any correspondence is missing. Towards this aim, we adopt a case where the imitator is a fluidic system which dynamics is totally different than the imitatee, that is a human performing different body poses. Our work proposes the fluidics formation control of fluid particles where the formation results from the imitation of observed human body poses. Fluidic formation control layer is responsible of assigning the correct fluid parameters to the swarm formation layer according to the body poses adopted by the human performer: The movement of the fluid particles is modeled using the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) which is a particle based Lagrangian method for simulation of fluid flows. The region based controller first extract the human body parts generating the regions where the attention is attracted by the imitatee and fits an appropriate ellipses to delimite boundaries of those regions. The ellipse parameters such as center of the ellipses, eccentricity, length of the major and minor axis etc. are used by the fludic layer in order to generate human body poses. This paper introduces our technique and demonstrates the imitation performance of our system.