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This letter presents a physical human-robot interaction scenario in which a robot guides and performs the role of a teacher within a defined dance training framework. A combined cognitive and physical feedback of performance is proposed for assisting the skill learning process. Direct contact cooperation has been designed through an adaptive impedance-based controller that adjusts according to the partners performance in the task. In measuring performance, a scoring system has been designed using the concept of progressive teaching (PT). The system adjusts the difficulty based on the users number of practices and performance history. Using the proposed method and a baseline constant controller, comparative experiments have shown that the PT presents better performance in the initial stage of skill learning. An analysis of the subjects perception of comfort, peace of mind, and robot performance have shown a significant difference at the p < .01 level, favoring the PT algorithm.
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.
An approach to model and estimate human walking kinematics in real-time for Physical Human-Robot Interaction is presented. The human gait velocity along the forward and vertical direction of motion is modelled according to the Yoyo-model. We designed an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) algorithm to estimate the frequency, bias and trigonometric state of a biased sinusoidal signal, from which the kinematic parameters of the Yoyo-model can be extracted. Quality and robustness of the estimation are improved by opportune filtering based on heuristics. The approach is successfully evaluated on a real dataset of walking humans, including complex trajectories and changing step frequency over time.
When a robot performs a task next to a human, physical interaction is inevitable: the human might push, pull, twist, or guide the robot. The state-of-the-art treats these interactions as disturbances that the robot should reject or avoid. At best, these robots respond safely while the human interacts; but after the human lets go, these robots simply return to their original behavior. We recognize that physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) is often intentional -- the human intervenes on purpose because the robot is not doing the task correctly. In this paper, we argue that when pHRI is intentional it is also informative: the robot can leverage interactions to learn how it should complete the rest of its current task even after the person lets go. We formalize pHRI as a dynamical system, where the human has in mind an objective function they want the robot to optimize, but the robot does not get direct access to the parameters of this objective -- they are internal to the human. Within our proposed framework human interactions become observations about the true objective. We introduce approximations to learn from and respond to pHRI in real-time. We recognize that not all human corrections are perfect: often users interact with the robot noisily, and so we improve the efficiency of robot learning from pHRI by reducing unintended learning. Finally, we conduct simulations and user studies on a robotic manipulator to compare our proposed approach to the state-of-the-art. Our results indicate that learning from pHRI leads to better task performance and improved human satisfaction.
Robot capabilities are maturing across domains, from self-driving cars, to bipeds and drones. As a result, robots will soon no longer be confined to safety-controlled industrial settings; instead, they will directly interact with the general public. The growing field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) studies various aspects of this scenario - from social norms to joint action to human-robot teams and more. Researchers in HRI have made great strides in developing models, methods, and algorithms for robots acting with and around humans, but these computational HRI models and algorithms generally do not come with formal guarantees and constraints on their operation. To enable human-interactive robots to move from the lab to real-world deployments, we must address this gap. This article provides an overview of verification, validation and synthesis techniques used to create demonstrably trustworthy systems, describes several HRI domains that could benefit from such techniques, and provides a roadmap for the challenges and the research needed to create formalized and guaranteed human-robot interaction.
Object manipulation is a basic element in everyday human lives. Robotic manipulation has progressed from maneuvering single-rigid-body objects with firm grasping to maneuvering soft objects and handling contact-rich actions. Meanwhile, technologies such as robot learning from demonstration have enabled humans to intuitively train robots. This paper discusses a new level of robotic learning-based manipulation. In contrast to the single form of learning from demonstration, we propose a multiform learning approach that integrates additional forms of skill acquisition, including adaptive learning from definition and evaluation. Moreover, going beyond state-of-the-art technologies of handling purely rigid or soft objects in a pseudo-static manner, our work allows robots to learn to handle partly rigid partly soft objects with time-critical skills and sophisticated contact control. Such capability of robotic manipulation offers a variety of new possibilities in human-robot interaction.