Information on a publication
Title |
Teaching a Humanoid Robot to Recognize and Reproduce Social Cues |
Authors |
Calinon, S. and Billard, A. |
Year of publication |
2006 |
Place of publication |
In Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), pp. 346-351. |
In a Robot Programming by Demonstration framework, several demonstrations of a task are required to generalize and reproduce the task under different circumstances. To teach a task to the robot, explicit pointers are required to signal the start/end of a demonstration and to switch between the learning/reproduction phases. Coordination of the learning system can be achieved by adding social cues to the interaction process. Here, we propose to use an imitation game to teach a humanoid robot to recognize communicative gestures, which then serve as social signals in a pointing-at-objects scenario. The system is based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and use motion sensors to track the user's gestures.
@InProceedings{Calinon06roman,
author = "S. Calinon and A. Billard",
title = "Teaching a Humanoid Robot to Recognize and Reproduce Social Cues",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the {IEEE} International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication ({RO-MAN})",
year = "2006",
month="September",
location="Hatfield, UK",
pages="346--351"
}
First, the user plays an imitation game with the robot, where the user reproduces commmunicative gestures performed by the robot (attention scaffolding, turn taking, head nods and head shakes). The robot then creates a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) characterizing the specificities of the user's gestures. The user then directs the attention of the robot to an object on the table by looking and pointing at it. The robot points at the object of interest and ask the user for an evaluation of its selection.
to play the video and on 
to view the video in fullscreen mode)
Cone-plane intersection v2.0 - Matlab sourcecode
Download
Download Cone-plane intersection sourcecode as a zipped file
Usage
Unzip the file and run 'demo1' in Matlab.
References
- Calinon, S. (2009) Robot Programming by Demonstration: A Probabilistic Approach. EPFL/CRC Press.
- Calinon, S. and Billard, A. (2006) Teaching a Humanoid Robot to Recognize and Reproduce Social Cues. IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), pp. 346-351.
Demo 1 - Demonstration of a cone-plane intersection interpreted in terms of Gaussian Probability Density Function (PDF)
This program computes the intersection between a cone and a plane, represented as a Gaussian Probability Density Function (PDF). The algorithm can be used to extract probabilistically information concerning gazing or pointing direction. Indeed, by representing a visual field as a cone and representing a table as a plane, the Gaussian distribution can be used to compute the probability that one object on the table is observed/pointed by the user.