Robots that imitate humans.

The study of social learning in robotics has been motivated by both scientific interest in the learning process and practical desires to produce machines that are useful, flexible, and easy to use. In this review, we introduce the social and task-oriented aspects of robot imitation. We focus on methodologies for addressing two fundamental problems. First, how does the robot know what to imitate? And second, how does the robot map that perception onto its own action repertoire to replicate it? In the future, programming humanoid robots to perform new tasks might be as simple as showing them.