Spatio-Temporal Anomaly Detection for Industrial Robots through Prediction in Unsupervised Feature Space

International audienceSpatio-temporal anomaly detection by unsupervised learning have applications in a wide range of practical settings. In this paper we present a surveillance system for industrial robots using a monocular camera. We propose a new unsupervised learning method to train a deep feature extractor from unlabeled images. Without any data augmentation , the algorithm co-learns the network parameters on different pseudo-classes simultaneously to create unbiased feature representation. Combining the learned features with a prediction system, we can detect irregularities in high dimensional data feed (e.g. video of a robot performing pick and place task). The results show how the proposed approach can detect previously unseen anomalies in the robot surveillance video. Although the technique is not designed for classification, we show the use of the learned features in a more traditional classification application for CIFAR-10 dataset

MaestROB: A Robotics Framework for Integrated Orchestration of Low-Level Control and High-Level Reasoning

This paper describes a framework called MaestROB. It is designed to make the robots perform complex tasks with high precision by simple high-level instructions given by natural language or demonstration. To realize this, it handles a hierarchical structure by using the knowledge stored in the forms of ontology and rules for bridging among different levels of instructions. Accordingly, the framework has multiple layers of processing components; perception and actuation control at the low level, symbolic planner and Watson APIs for cognitive capabilities and semantic understanding, and orchestration of these components by a new open source robot middleware called Project Intu at its core. We show how this framework can be used in a complex scenario where multiple actors (human, a communication robot, and an industrial robot) collaborate to perform a common industrial task. Human teaches an assembly task to Pepper (a humanoid robot from SoftBank Robotics) using natural language conversation and demonstration. Our framework helps Pepper perceive the human demonstration and generate a sequence of actions for UR5 (collaborative robot arm from Universal Robots), which ultimately performs the assembly (e.g. insertion) task.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2018. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19JsdZi0TW