Human-robot interaction and computer-vision-based services for autonomous robots

Identifier:  TDX:2421

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX2421

Authors:  Bautista Ballester, Jordi

Abstract:
Imitation Learning (IL), or robot Programming by Demonstration (PbD), covers methods by which a robot learns new skills through human guidance and imitation. PbD takes its inspiration from the way humans learn new skills by imitation in order to develop methods by which new tasks can be transmitted to robots. This thesis is motivated by the generic question of “what to imitate?” which concerns the problem of how to extract the essential features of a task. To this end, here we adopt Action Recognition (AR) perspective in order to allow the robot to decide what has to be imitated or inferred when interacting with a human kind. The proposed approach is based on a well-known method from natural language processing: namely, Bag of Words (BoW). This method is applied to large databases in order to obtain a trained model. Although BoW is a machine learning technique that is used in various fields of research, in action classification for robot learning it is far from accurate. Moreover, it focuses on the classification of objects and gestures rather than actions. Thus, in this thesis we show that the method is suitable in action classification scenarios for merging information from different sources or different trials. This thesis makes three contributions: (1) it proposes a general method for dealing with action recognition and thus to contribute to imitation learning; (2) the methodology can be applied to large databases which include different modes of action captures; and (3) the method is applied specifically in a real international innovation project called Vinbot.