Human-to-Robot Attention Transfer for Robot Execution Failure Avoidance Using Stacked Neural Networks

Due to world dynamics and hardware uncertainty, robots inevitably fail in task executions, leading to undesired or even dangerous executions. To avoid failures for improved robot performance, it is critical to identify and correct robot abnormal executions in an early stage. However, limited by reasoning capability and knowledge level, it is challenging for a robot to self diagnose and correct their abnormal behaviors. To solve this problem, a novel method is proposed, human-to-robot attention transfer (H2R-AT) to seek help from a human. H2R-AT is developed based on a novel stacked neural networks model, transferring human attention embedded in verbal reminders to robot attention embedded in robot visual perceiving. With the attention transfer from a human, a robot understands what and where human concerns are to identify and correct its abnormal executions. To validate the effectiveness of H2R-AT, two representative task scenarios, "serve water for a human in a kitchen" and "pick up a defective gear in a factory" with abnormal robot executions, were designed in an open-access simulation platform V-REP; $252$ volunteers were recruited to provide about 12000 verbal reminders to learn and test the attention transfer model H2R-AT. With an accuracy of $73.68\%$ in transferring attention and accuracy of $66.86\%$ in avoiding robot execution failures, the effectiveness of H2R-AT was validated.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figure