Self-Supervised Prediction of the Intention to Interact with a Service Robot

A service robot can provide a smoother interaction experience if it has the ability to proactively detect whether a nearby user intends to interact, in order to adapt its behavior e.g. by explicitly showing that it is available to provide a service. In this work, we propose a learning-based approach to predict the probability that a human user will interact with a robot before the interaction actually begins; the approach is self-supervised because after each encounter with a human, the robot can automatically label it depending on whether it resulted in an interaction or not. We explore different classification approaches, using different sets of features considering the pose and the motion of the user. We validate and deploy the approach in three scenarios. The first collects $3442$ natural sequences (both interacting and non-interacting) representing employees in an office break area: a real-world, challenging setting, where we consider a coffee machine in place of a service robot. The other two scenarios represent researchers interacting with service robots ($200$ and $72$ sequences, respectively). Results show that, even in challenging real-world settings, our approach can learn without external supervision, and can achieve accurate classification (i.e. AUROC greater than $0.9$) of the user's intention to interact with an advance of more than $3$s before the interaction actually occurs.Comment: Paper under revision for Robotics and Autonomous Systems journa

GROWL:Group Detection with Link Prediction

Interaction group detection has been previously addressed with bottom-up approaches which relied on the position and orientation information of individuals. These approaches were primarily based on pairwise affinity matrices and were limited to static, third-person views. This problem can greatly benefit from a holistic approach based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) beyond pairwise relationships, due to the inherent spatial configuration that exists between individuals who form interaction groups. Our proposed method, GROup detection With Link prediction (GROWL), demonstrates the effectiveness of a GNN based approach. GROWL predicts the link between two individuals by generating a feature embedding based on their neighbourhood in the graph and determines whether they are connected with a shallow binary classification method such as Multi-layer Perceptrons (MLPs). We test our method against other state-of-the-art group detection approaches on both a third-person view dataset and a robocentric (i.e., egocentric) dataset. In addition, we propose a multimodal approach based on RGB and depth data to calculate a representation GROWL can utilise as input. Our results show that a GNN based approach can significantly improve accuracy across different camera views, i.e., third-person and egocentric views