Development of techniques to allow a robot to learn multiple motor skills through the demonstration of humans and animals.

The goal of this project is to develop various techniques in order to teach robots rich and adaptive motor skills (e.g. locomotion or reaching motion). The developed techniques allow a robot to learn multiple motor skills through the demonstrations of humans or animals. 

For example, a robotic system was developed for catching a free-flying object (e.g. a partially-filled bottle or a racket) by learning from human catching demonstrations. At the current state of research, robots can learn how to walk, how to catch and throw an object, etc. In the future, these robotic learning techniques for locomotion, catching and throwing will enable robots to become personal coaches, such as tennis partners or baseball players, etc. However, to realize this, further researches in soft-ware as well as hardware are needed (e.g. playing strategy, improving the robot's body parts for faster and more accurate movements).