Techniques for transferring highly dimensional movements to lower dimensional robot movements are described. In an example, a reference motion of a target is used to train a non-linear approximator of a robot to learn how to perform the motion. The robot and the target are associated with a robot model and a target model, respectively. Features related to the positions of the robot joints are input to the non-linear approximator. During the training, a robot joint is simulated, which results in movement of this joint and different directions of a robot link connected thereto. The robot link is mapped to a link of the target model. The directions of the robot link are compared to the direction of the target link to learn the best movement of the robot joint. The training is repeated for the different links and for different phases of the reference motion.