Toward an Unified Representation for Imitation of Human Motion on Humanoids

In this paper, we present a framework for perception, visualization, reproduction and recognition of human motion. On the perception side, various human motion capture systems exist, all of them having in common to calculate a sequence of configuration vectors for the human model in the core of the system. These human models may be 2D or 3D kinematic models, or on a lower level, 2D or 3D positions of markers. However, for appropriate visualization in terms of a 3D animation, and for reproduction on an actual robot, the acquired motion must be mapped to the target 3D kinematic model. On the understanding side, various action and activity recognition systems exist, which assume input of different kinds. However, given human motion capture data in terms of a high-dimensional 3D kinematic model, it is possible to transform the configurations into the appropriate representation which is specific to the recognition module. We will propose a complete architecture, allowing the replacement of any perception, visualization, reproduction module, or target platform. In the core of our architecture, we define a reference 3D kinematic model, which we intend to become a common standard in the robotics community, to allow sharing different software modules and having common benchmarks.