A framework for digitisation of manual manufacturing task knowledge using gaming interface technology

Intense market competition and the global skill supply crunch are hurting the manufacturing industry, which is heavily dependent on skilled labour. Companies must look for innovative ways to acquire manufacturing skills from their experts and transfer them to novices and eventually to machines to remain competitive. There is a lack of systematic processes in the manufacturing industry and research for cost-effective capture and transfer of human skills. Therefore, the aim of this research is to develop a framework for digitisation of manual manufacturing task knowledge, a major constituent of which is human skill. The proposed digitisation framework is based on the theory of human-workpiece interactions that is developed in this research. The unique aspect of the framework is the use of consumer-grade gaming interface technology to capture and record manual manufacturing tasks in digital form to enable the extraction, decoding and transfer of manufacturing knowledge constituents that are associated with the task. The framework is implemented, tested and refined using 5 case studies, including 1 toy assembly task, 2 real-life-like assembly tasks, 1 simulated assembly task and 1 real-life composite layup task. It is successfully validated based on the outcomes of the case studies and a benchmarking exercise that was conducted to evaluate its performance. This research contributes to knowledge in five main areas, namely, (1) the theory of human-workpiece interactions to decipher human behaviour in manual manufacturing tasks, (2) a cohesive and holistic framework to digitise manual manufacturing task knowledge, especially tacit knowledge such as human action and reaction skills, (3) the use of low-cost gaming interface technology to capture human actions and the effect of those actions on workpieces during a manufacturing task, (4) a new way to use hidden Markov modelling to produce digital skill models to represent human ability to perform complex tasks and (5) extraction and decoding of manufacturing knowledge constituents from the digital skill models

When Kernel Methods meet Feature Learning: Log-Covariance Network for Action Recognition from Skeletal Data

Human action recognition from skeletal data is a hot research topic and important in many open domain applications of computer vision, thanks to recently introduced 3D sensors. In the literature, naive methods simply transfer off-the-shelf techniques from video to the skeletal representation. However, the current state-of-the-art is contended between to different paradigms: kernel-based methods and feature learning with (recurrent) neural networks. Both approaches show strong performances, yet they exhibit heavy, but complementary, drawbacks. Motivated by this fact, our work aims at combining together the best of the two paradigms, by proposing an approach where a shallow network is fed with a covariance representation. Our intuition is that, as long as the dynamics is effectively modeled, there is no need for the classification network to be deep nor recurrent in order to score favorably. We validate this hypothesis in a broad experimental analysis over 6 publicly available datasets.Comment: 2017 IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshop

MultiIoT: Towards Large-scale Multisensory Learning for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT), the network integrating billions of smart physical devices embedded with sensors, software, and communication technologies for the purpose of connecting and exchanging data with other devices and systems, is a critical and rapidly expanding component of our modern world. The IoT ecosystem provides a rich source of real-world modalities such as motion, thermal, geolocation, imaging, depth, sensors, video, and audio for prediction tasks involving the pose, gaze, activities, and gestures of humans as well as the touch, contact, pose, 3D of physical objects. Machine learning presents a rich opportunity to automatically process IoT data at scale, enabling efficient inference for impact in understanding human wellbeing, controlling physical devices, and interconnecting smart cities. To develop machine learning technologies for IoT, this paper proposes MultiIoT, the most expansive IoT benchmark to date, encompassing over 1.15 million samples from 12 modalities and 8 tasks. MultiIoT introduces unique challenges involving (1) learning from many sensory modalities, (2) fine-grained interactions across long temporal ranges, and (3) extreme heterogeneity due to unique structure and noise topologies in real-world sensors. We also release a set of strong modeling baselines, spanning modality and task-specific methods to multisensory and multitask models to encourage future research in multisensory representation learning for IoT

Human-Machine Interfaces for Service Robotics

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