222 research outputs found
Socially intelligent robots that understand and respond to human touch
Touch is an important nonverbal form of interpersonal interaction which is used to communicate emotions and other social messages. As interactions with social robots are likely to become more common in the near future these robots should also be able to engage in tactile interaction with humans. Therefore, the aim of the research presented in this dissertation is to work towards socially intelligent robots that can understand and respond to human touch. To become a socially intelligent actor a robot must be able to sense, classify and interpret human touch and respond to this in an appropriate manner. To this end we present work that addresses different parts of this interaction cycle. The contributions of this dissertation are the following. We have made a touch gesture dataset available to the research community and have presented benchmark results. Furthermore, we have sparked interest into the new field of social touch recognition by organizing a machine learning challenge and have pinpointed directions for further research. Also, we have exposed potential difficulties for the recognition of social touch in more naturalistic settings. Moreover, the findings presented in this dissertation can help to inform the design of a behavioral model for robot pet companions that can understand and respond to human touch. Additionally, we have focused on the requirements for tactile interaction with robot pets for health care applications
RGB-D-based Action Recognition Datasets: A Survey
Human action recognition from RGB-D (Red, Green, Blue and Depth) data has
attracted increasing attention since the first work reported in 2010. Over this
period, many benchmark datasets have been created to facilitate the development
and evaluation of new algorithms. This raises the question of which dataset to
select and how to use it in providing a fair and objective comparative
evaluation against state-of-the-art methods. To address this issue, this paper
provides a comprehensive review of the most commonly used action recognition
related RGB-D video datasets, including 27 single-view datasets, 10 multi-view
datasets, and 7 multi-person datasets. The detailed information and analysis of
these datasets is a useful resource in guiding insightful selection of datasets
for future research. In addition, the issues with current algorithm evaluation
vis-\'{a}-vis limitations of the available datasets and evaluation protocols
are also highlighted; resulting in a number of recommendations for collection
of new datasets and use of evaluation protocols
Two-Stream RNN/CNN for Action Recognition in 3D Videos
The recognition of actions from video sequences has many applications in
health monitoring, assisted living, surveillance, and smart homes. Despite
advances in sensing, in particular related to 3D video, the methodologies to
process the data are still subject to research. We demonstrate superior results
by a system which combines recurrent neural networks with convolutional neural
networks in a voting approach. The gated-recurrent-unit-based neural networks
are particularly well-suited to distinguish actions based on long-term
information from optical tracking data; the 3D-CNNs focus more on detailed,
recent information from video data. The resulting features are merged in an SVM
which then classifies the movement. In this architecture, our method improves
recognition rates of state-of-the-art methods by 14% on standard data sets.Comment: Published in 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent
Robots and Systems (IROS
Reconstructing Three-Dimensional Models of Interacting Humans
Understanding 3d human interactions is fundamental for fine-grained scene
analysis and behavioural modeling. However, most of the existing models predict
incorrect, lifeless 3d estimates, that miss the subtle human contact
aspects--the essence of the event--and are of little use for detailed
behavioral understanding. This paper addresses such issues with several
contributions: (1) we introduce models for interaction signature estimation
(ISP) encompassing contact detection, segmentation, and 3d contact signature
prediction; (2) we show how such components can be leveraged to ensure contact
consistency during 3d reconstruction; (3) we construct several large datasets
for learning and evaluating 3d contact prediction and reconstruction methods;
specifically, we introduce CHI3D, a lab-based accurate 3d motion capture
dataset with 631 sequences containing contact events, ground
truth 3d poses, as well as FlickrCI3D, a dataset of images, with
processed pairs of people, and facet-level surface
correspondences. Finally, (4) we propose methodology for recovering the
ground-truth pose and shape of interacting people in a controlled setup and (5)
annotate all 3d interaction motions in CHI3D with textual descriptions. Motion
data in multiple formats (GHUM and SMPLX parameters, Human3.6m 3d joints) is
made available for research purposes at \url{https://ci3d.imar.ro}, together
with an evaluation server and a public benchmark
Industrial Human Activity Prediction and Detection Using Sequential Memory Networks
Prediction of human activity and detection of subsequent actions is crucial for improving the interaction between humans and robots during collaborative operations. Deep-learning techniques are being applied to recognize human activities, including industrial applications. However, the lack of sufficient dataset in the industrial domain and complexities of some industrial activities such as screw driving, assembling small parts, and others affect the model development and testing of human activities. The InHard dataset (Industrial Human Activity Recognition Dataset) was recently published to facilitate industrial human activity recognition for better human-robot collaboration, which still lacks extended evaluation. We propose an activity recognition method using a combined convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) techniques to evaluate the InHard dataset and compare it with a new dataset captured in a lab environment. This method improves the success rate of activity recognition by processing temporal and spatial information. Accordingly, the accuracy of the dataset is tested using labeled lists of activities from IMU and video data. A model is trained and tested for nine low-level activity classes with approximately 400 samples per class. The test result shows 88% accuracy for IMU-based skeleton data, 77% for RGB spatial video, and 63% for RGB video-based skeleton. The result has been verified using a previously published region-based activity recognition. The proposed approach can be extended to push the cognition capability of robots in human-centric workplaces
Touch Technology in Affective Human, Robot, Virtual-Human Interactions: A Survey
Given the importance of affective touch in human interactions, technology designers are increasingly attempting to bring this modality to the core of interactive technology. Advances in haptics and touch-sensing technology have been critical to fostering interest in this area. In this survey, we review how affective touch is investigated to enhance and support the human experience with or through technology. We explore this question across three different research areas to highlight their epistemology, main findings, and the challenges that persist. First, we review affective touch technology through the human–computer interaction literature to understand how it has been applied to the mediation of human–human interaction and its roles in other human interactions particularly with oneself, augmented objects/media, and affect-aware devices. We further highlight the datasets and methods that have been investigated for automatic detection and interpretation of affective touch in this area. In addition, we discuss the modalities of affective touch expressions in both humans and technology in these interactions. Second, we separately review how affective touch has been explored in human–robot and real-human–virtual-human interactions where the technical challenges encountered and the types of experience aimed at are different. We conclude with a discussion of the gaps and challenges that emerge from the review to steer research in directions that are critical for advancing affective touch technology and recognition systems. In our discussion, we also raise ethical issues that should be considered for responsible innovation in this growing area
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