Natural and intuitive human interaction with robotic systems is a key point to develop robots assisting people in an easy and effective way. In this paper, a Human Robot Interaction (HRI) system able to recognize gestures usually employed in human non-verbal communication is introduced, and an in-depth study of its usability is performed. The system deals with dynamic gestures such as waving or nodding which are recognized using a Dynamic Time Warping approach based on gesture specific features computed from depth maps. A static gesture consisting in pointing at an object is also recognized. The pointed location is then estimated in order to detect candidate objects the user may refer to. When the pointed object is unclear for the robot, a disambiguation procedure by means of either a verbal or gestural dialogue is performed. This skill would lead to the robot picking an object in behalf of the user, which could present difficulties to do it by itself. The overall system-which is composed by a NAO and Wifibot robots, a Kinect TM v2 sensor and two laptops-is firstly evaluated in a structured lab setup. Then, a broad set of user tests has been completed, which allows to assess correct performance in terms of recognition rates, easiness of use and response times.
Abstract. The deployment of robots at home must involve robots with pre-defined skills and the capability of personalizing their behavior by non-expert users. A framework to tackle this personalization is presented and applied to an automatic feeding task. The personalization involves the caregiver providing several examples of feeding using Learning-byDemostration, and a ProMP formalism to compute an overall trajectory and the variance along the path. Experiments show the validity of the approach in generating different feeding motions to adapt to user's preferences, automatically extracting the relevant task parameters. The importance of the nature of the demonstrations is also assessed, and two training strategies are compared.
Healthcare robots will be the next big advance in humans' domestic welfare, with robots able to assist elderly people and users with disabilities. However, each user has his/her own preferences, needs and abilities. Therefore, robotic assistants will need to adapt to them, behaving accordingly. Towards this goal, we propose a method to perform behavior adaptation to the user preferences, using symbolic task planning. A user model is built from the user's answers to simple questions with a Fuzzy Inference System, and it is then integrated into the planning domain. We describe an adaptation method based on both the user satisfaction and the execution outcome, depending on which penalizations are applied to the planner's rules. We demonstrate the application of the adaptation method in a simple shoe-fitting scenario, with experiments performed in a simulated user environment. The results show quick behavior adaptation, even when the user behavior changes, as well as robustness to wrong inference of the initial user model. Finally, some insights in a non-simulated world shoe-fitting setup are also provided.
Probabilistic planning is very useful for handling uncertainty in planning tasks to be carried out by robots. ROSPlan is a framework for task planning in the Robot Operating System (ROS), but until now it has not been possible to use probabilistic planners within the framework. This systems paper presents a standardized integration of probabilistic planners into ROSPlan that allows for reasoning with non-deterministic effects and is agnostic to the probabilistic planner used. We instantiate the framework in a system for the case of a mobile robot performing tasks indoors, where probabilistic plans are generated and executed by the PROST planner. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in a real-world robotic scenario.
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