Endowing humanoid robots with the ability of skill learning will enable them to be versatile and skillful in performing various tasks. The problem of transferring human skills to humanoid robots raises tremendous research interest in studying human and robot motor skills. Our research aims at developing a quantitative measure of robot motor capability of a humanoid root motor system for the application of transferring human skills to a humanoid robot. An in-depth study of basic intrinsic properties of robot motor capability based on information theory will be performed to derive a pseudo index of motor performance. This pseudo index of motor performance is derived from robot kinematics, dynamics, and control with the speed-accuracy constraint taken into consideration. With the speed-accuracy constraint, the motor performance of a robot is optimized to accomplish a task. The research results demonstrate an increased understanding of robot motor capability that shows the capability and limitation of a robot for learning skills from human demonstration. The project plans to verify the result on an existing humanoid robot. The project results will provide new insights in humanoid robot motor learning and control, and launch a new research direction on human-robot interaction when both humans and robots better know their respective motor capabilities. The broader impacts include incorporation of research results into existing graduate and undergraduate robotics courses, and outreach activities of a weeklong robotics summer camp and a lab open house for high-school students. The research results will be disseminated in professional conferences, workshops and archival journal publications.
