On Inferring Intentions in Shared Tasks for Industrial Collaborative Robots

Abstract

Inferring human operators’ actions in shared collaborative tasks plays a crucial role in enhancing the cognitive capabilities of industrial robots. In all these incipient collaborative robotic applications, humans and robots not only should share space, but also forces and the execution of a task. In this article, we present a robotic system that is able to identify different human’s intentions and to adapt its behavior consequently, only employing force data. In order to accomplish this aim, three major contributions are presented: (a) a force based operator’s intention recognition system based on data from only two users; (b) a force based dataset of physical human–robot interaction; and (c) validation of the whole system with 15 people in a scenario inspired by a realistic industrial application. This work is an important step towards a more natural and user-friendly manner of physical human–robot interaction in scenarios where humans and robots collaborate in the accomplishment of a task.

Recurrent Neural Networks for Inferring Intentions in Shared Tasks for Industrial Collaborative Robots

“…Olivares-Alarcos et al [4], proposed to infer the operator's intentions in order to adapt the robot's behavior while a robot and a human shared the execution of a task. Authors used a dataset containing force signals and a window-based approach to classify the operator's intention.…”

“…The dataset used in this work [4] consists of the force/torque signals recorded from the physical human-robot interaction during the execution of a collaborative task,…”

“…The proposed network first is evaluated with the O w criterion in order to have an evaluation at the same time instants as [4]. Fig.…”

“…We consider the realistic scenario proposed by Olivares-Alarcos et al [4]. It provides an industrial collaborative task where a robot and a human share the task of cleaning and polishing an object.…”

Cognitive Robotics and Control

“…A novel autonomous camera guidance approach for laparoscopic surgery is proposed in Reference [7], using LfD as well as being validated using an experimental surgical robotic platform. Moving forward, an important step towards a more natural and user-friendly manner of physical human-robot interaction in scenarios where humans and robots collaborate in the accomplishment of a task is presented in Reference [8]. A robotic system is introduced that is able to identify different humans' intentions and to adapt its behaviour consequently, only employing force data.…”