6,030 research outputs found
Learning Robot Activities from First-Person Human Videos Using Convolutional Future Regression
We design a new approach that allows robot learning of new activities from
unlabeled human example videos. Given videos of humans executing the same
activity from a human's viewpoint (i.e., first-person videos), our objective is
to make the robot learn the temporal structure of the activity as its future
regression network, and learn to transfer such model for its own motor
execution. We present a new deep learning model: We extend the state-of-the-art
convolutional object detection network for the representation/estimation of
human hands in training videos, and newly introduce the concept of using a
fully convolutional network to regress (i.e., predict) the intermediate scene
representation corresponding to the future frame (e.g., 1-2 seconds later).
Combining these allows direct prediction of future locations of human hands and
objects, which enables the robot to infer the motor control plan using our
manipulation network. We experimentally confirm that our approach makes
learning of robot activities from unlabeled human interaction videos possible,
and demonstrate that our robot is able to execute the learned collaborative
activities in real-time directly based on its camera input
Time-Contrastive Networks: Self-Supervised Learning from Video
We propose a self-supervised approach for learning representations and
robotic behaviors entirely from unlabeled videos recorded from multiple
viewpoints, and study how this representation can be used in two robotic
imitation settings: imitating object interactions from videos of humans, and
imitating human poses. Imitation of human behavior requires a
viewpoint-invariant representation that captures the relationships between
end-effectors (hands or robot grippers) and the environment, object attributes,
and body pose. We train our representations using a metric learning loss, where
multiple simultaneous viewpoints of the same observation are attracted in the
embedding space, while being repelled from temporal neighbors which are often
visually similar but functionally different. In other words, the model
simultaneously learns to recognize what is common between different-looking
images, and what is different between similar-looking images. This signal
causes our model to discover attributes that do not change across viewpoint,
but do change across time, while ignoring nuisance variables such as
occlusions, motion blur, lighting and background. We demonstrate that this
representation can be used by a robot to directly mimic human poses without an
explicit correspondence, and that it can be used as a reward function within a
reinforcement learning algorithm. While representations are learned from an
unlabeled collection of task-related videos, robot behaviors such as pouring
are learned by watching a single 3rd-person demonstration by a human. Reward
functions obtained by following the human demonstrations under the learned
representation enable efficient reinforcement learning that is practical for
real-world robotic systems. Video results, open-source code and dataset are
available at https://sermanet.github.io/imitat
Forecasting Hands and Objects in Future Frames
This paper presents an approach to forecast future presence and location of
human hands and objects. Given an image frame, the goal is to predict what
objects will appear in the future frame (e.g., 5 seconds later) and where they
will be located at, even when they are not visible in the current frame. The
key idea is that (1) an intermediate representation of a convolutional object
recognition model abstracts scene information in its frame and that (2) we can
predict (i.e., regress) such representations corresponding to the future frames
based on that of the current frame. We design a new two-stream convolutional
neural network (CNN) architecture for videos by extending the state-of-the-art
convolutional object detection network, and present a new fully convolutional
regression network for predicting future scene representations. Our experiments
confirm that combining the regressed future representation with our detection
network allows reliable estimation of future hands and objects in videos. We
obtain much higher accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art future object
presence forecast method on a public dataset
Symbol Emergence in Robotics: A Survey
Humans can learn the use of language through physical interaction with their
environment and semiotic communication with other people. It is very important
to obtain a computational understanding of how humans can form a symbol system
and obtain semiotic skills through their autonomous mental development.
Recently, many studies have been conducted on the construction of robotic
systems and machine-learning methods that can learn the use of language through
embodied multimodal interaction with their environment and other systems.
Understanding human social interactions and developing a robot that can
smoothly communicate with human users in the long term, requires an
understanding of the dynamics of symbol systems and is crucially important. The
embodied cognition and social interaction of participants gradually change a
symbol system in a constructive manner. In this paper, we introduce a field of
research called symbol emergence in robotics (SER). SER is a constructive
approach towards an emergent symbol system. The emergent symbol system is
socially self-organized through both semiotic communications and physical
interactions with autonomous cognitive developmental agents, i.e., humans and
developmental robots. Specifically, we describe some state-of-art research
topics concerning SER, e.g., multimodal categorization, word discovery, and a
double articulation analysis, that enable a robot to obtain words and their
embodied meanings from raw sensory--motor information, including visual
information, haptic information, auditory information, and acoustic speech
signals, in a totally unsupervised manner. Finally, we suggest future
directions of research in SER.Comment: submitted to Advanced Robotic
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