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Future robots are expected to cooperate with humans in daily activities. Efficient cooperation requires new techniques for transferring human skills to robots. This thesis presents an approach on how a robot can extract and replicate a motion by observing how a human instructor conducts it. In this way, the robot can be taught without any explicit instructions and the human instructor does not need any expertise in robot programming. A system has been implemented which consists of two main parts. The first part is data acquisition and motion extraction. Vision is the most important sensor with which a human can interact with the surrounding world. Therefore two cameras are used to capture the image sequences of a moving rigid object. In order to compress the incoming images from the cameras and extract 3D motion information of the rigid object, feature detection and tracking are applied to the images. Corners are chosen as the main features because they are more stable under perspective projection and during motion. A reliable corner detector is implemented and a new corner tracking algorithm is proposed based on smooth motion constraints. With both spatial and temporal constraints, 3D trajectories of a set of points on the object can be obtained and the 3D motion parameters of the object can be reliably calculated by the algorithm proposed in this thesis. Once the 3D motion parameters are available through the vision system, the robot should be programmed to replicate this motion. Since we are interested in smooth motion and the similarity between two motions, the task of the second part of our system is therefore to extract motion characteristics and to transfer these to the robot. It can be proven that the characteristics of a parametric cubic B-spline curve are completely determined by its control points, which can be obtained by the least-squares fitting method, given some data points on the curve. Therefore a parametric cubic B–spline curve is fitted to the motion data and its control points are calculated. Given the robot configuration the obtained control points can be scaled, translated, and rotated so that a motion trajectory can be generated for the robot to replicate the given motion in its own workspace with the required smoothness and similarity, although the absolute motion trajectories of the robot and the instructor can be different. All the above modules have been integrated and results of an experiment with the whole system show that the approach proposed in this thesis can extract motion characteristics and transfer these to a robot. A robot arm has successfully replicated a human arm movement with similar shape characteristics by our approach. In conclusion, such a system collects human skills and intelligence through vision and transfers them to the robot. Therefore, a robot with such a system can interact with its environment and learn by observation.

Thesis ( Ph.D.) -- McMaster University, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 169-172). Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2004. / Adviser: G.M.T. D'Eleuterio.

Thesis (M.App.Sc.) - Carleton University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 133-135). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.