10,228 research outputs found
Understanding of Object Manipulation Actions Using Human Multi-Modal Sensory Data
Object manipulation actions represent an important share of the Activities of
Daily Living (ADLs). In this work, we study how to enable service robots to use
human multi-modal data to understand object manipulation actions, and how they
can recognize such actions when humans perform them during human-robot
collaboration tasks. The multi-modal data in this study consists of videos,
hand motion data, applied forces as represented by the pressure patterns on the
hand, and measurements of the bending of the fingers, collected as human
subjects performed manipulation actions. We investigate two different
approaches. In the first one, we show that multi-modal signal (motion, finger
bending and hand pressure) generated by the action can be decomposed into a set
of primitives that can be seen as its building blocks. These primitives are
used to define 24 multi-modal primitive features. The primitive features can in
turn be used as an abstract representation of the multi-modal signal and
employed for action recognition. In the latter approach, the visual features
are extracted from the data using a pre-trained image classification deep
convolutional neural network. The visual features are subsequently used to
train the classifier. We also investigate whether adding data from other
modalities produces a statistically significant improvement in the classifier
performance. We show that both approaches produce a comparable performance.
This implies that image-based methods can successfully recognize human actions
during human-robot collaboration. On the other hand, in order to provide
training data for the robot so it can learn how to perform object manipulation
actions, multi-modal data provides a better alternative
Teaching humanoid robotics by means of human teleoperation through RGB-D sensors
This paper presents a graduate course project on humanoid robotics offered by the University of Padova. The target is to safely lift an object by teleoperating a small humanoid. Students have to map human limbs into robot joints, guarantee the robot stability during the motion, and teleoperate the robot to perform the correct movement. We introduce the following innovative aspects with respect to classical robotic classes: i) the use of humanoid robots as teaching tools; ii) the simplification of the stable locomotion problem by exploiting the potential of teleoperation; iii) the adoption of a Project-Based Learning constructivist approach as teaching methodology. The learning objectives of both course and project are introduced and compared with the students\u2019 background. Design and constraints students have to deal with are reported, together with the amount of time they and their instructors dedicated to solve tasks. A set of evaluation results are provided in order to validate the authors\u2019 purpose, including the students\u2019 personal feedback. A discussion about possible future improvements is reported, hoping to encourage further spread of educational robotics in schools at all levels
The Whole World in Your Hand: Active and Interactive Segmentation
Object segmentation is a fundamental problem
in computer vision and a powerful resource for
development. This paper presents three embodied approaches to the visual segmentation of objects. Each approach to segmentation is aided
by the presence of a hand or arm in the proximity of the object to be segmented. The first
approach is suitable for a robotic system, where
the robot can use its arm to evoke object motion. The second method operates on a wearable system, viewing the world from a human's
perspective, with instrumentation to help detect
and segment objects that are held in the wearer's
hand. The third method operates when observing
a human teacher, locating periodic motion (finger/arm/object waving or tapping) and using it
as a seed for segmentation. We show that object segmentation can serve as a key resource for
development by demonstrating methods that exploit high-quality object segmentations to develop
both low-level vision capabilities (specialized feature detectors) and high-level vision capabilities
(object recognition and localization)
Learning Social Affordance Grammar from Videos: Transferring Human Interactions to Human-Robot Interactions
In this paper, we present a general framework for learning social affordance
grammar as a spatiotemporal AND-OR graph (ST-AOG) from RGB-D videos of human
interactions, and transfer the grammar to humanoids to enable a real-time
motion inference for human-robot interaction (HRI). Based on Gibbs sampling,
our weakly supervised grammar learning can automatically construct a
hierarchical representation of an interaction with long-term joint sub-tasks of
both agents and short term atomic actions of individual agents. Based on a new
RGB-D video dataset with rich instances of human interactions, our experiments
of Baxter simulation, human evaluation, and real Baxter test demonstrate that
the model learned from limited training data successfully generates human-like
behaviors in unseen scenarios and outperforms both baselines.Comment: The 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
(ICRA
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