Real-time visual system for interaction with a humanoid robot

In this paper we describe a new real-time visual system that enables a humanoid robot to learn from and interact with humans. The core of the visual system is a probabilistic tracker that uses shape and color information to find relevant objects in the scene. Multiscale representations, windowing and masking are employed to accelerate the data processing. The perception system is directly coupled with the motor control system of our humanoid robot DB. We present an example of on-line interaction with a humanoid robot: mimicking of human hand motion. The generation of humanoid robot motion based on the human motion is accomplished in real-time. The study is supported by experimental results on DB.