No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we present an approach for robot learning of social affordance from human activity videos. We consider the problem in the context of human-robot interaction: Our approach learns structural representations of human-human (and human-object-human) interactions, describing how body-parts of each agent move with respect to each other and what spatial relations they should maintain to complete each sub-event (i.e., sub-goal). This enables the robot to infer its own movement in reaction to the human body motion, allowing it to naturally replicate such interactions. We introduce the representation of social affordance and propose a generative model for its weakly supervised learning from human demonstration videos. Our approach discovers critical steps (i.e., latent sub-events) in an interaction and the typical motion associated with them, learning what body-parts should be involved and how. The experimental results demonstrate that our Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) based learning algorithm automatically discovers semantically meaningful interactive affordance from RGB-D videos, which allows us to generate appropriate full body motion for an agent.
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.
For a safe, natural and effective human-robot social interaction, it is essential to develop a system that allows a robot to demonstrate the perceivable responsive behaviors to complex human behaviors. We introduce the Multimodal Deep Attention Recurrent Q-Network using which the robot exhibits human-like social interaction skills after 14 days of interacting with people in an uncontrolled real world. Each and every day during the 14 days, the system gathered robot interaction experiences with people through a hit-and-trial method and then trained the MDARQN on these experiences using end-to-end reinforcement learning approach. The results of interaction based learning indicate that the robot has learned to respond to complex human behaviors in a perceivable and socially acceptable manner.
For robots to coexist with humans in a social world like ours, it is crucial that they possess human-like social interaction skills. Programming a robot to possess such skills is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a Multimodal Deep Q-Network (MDQN) to enable a robot to learn human-like interaction skills through a trial and error method. This paper aims to develop a robot that gathers data during its interaction with a human and learns human interaction behaviour from the high-dimensional sensory information using end-to-end reinforcement learning. This paper demonstrates that the robot was able to learn basic interaction skills successfully, after 14 days of interacting with people.
This paper presents INGRESS, a robot system that follows human natural language instructions to pick and place everyday objects. The core issue here is the grounding of referring expressions: infer objects and their relationships from input images and language expressions. INGRESS allows for unconstrained object categories and unconstrained language expressions. Further, it asks questions to disambiguate referring expressions interactively. To achieve these, we take the approach of grounding by generation and propose a two-stage neural network model for grounding. The first stage uses a neural network to generate visual descriptions of objects, compares them with the input language expression, and identifies a set of candidate objects. The second stage uses another neural network to examine all pairwise relations between the candidates and infers the most likely referred object. The same neural networks are used for both grounding and question generation for disambiguation. Experiments show that INGRESS outperformed a state-of-the-art method on the RefCOCO dataset and in robot experiments with humans.
The human language is one of the most natural interfaces for humans to interact with robots. This paper presents a robot system that retrieves everyday objects with unconstrained natural language descriptions. A core issue for the system is semantic and spatial grounding, which is to infer objects and their spatial relationships from images and natural language expressions. We introduce a two-stage neural-network grounding pipeline that maps natural language referring expressions directly to objects in the images. The first stage uses visual descriptions in the referring expressions to generate a candidate set of relevant objects. The second stage examines all pairwise relationships between the candidates and predicts the most likely referred object according to the spatial descriptions in the referring expressions. A key feature of our system is that by leveraging a large dataset of images labeled with text descriptions, it allows unrestricted object types and natural language referring expressions. Preliminary results indicate that our system outperforms a near state-of-the-art object comprehension system on standard benchmark datasets. We also present a robot system that follows voice commands to pick and place previously unseen objects.