Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC), which enables a workspace where human and robot can dynamically and safely collaborate for improved operational efficiency, has been identified as a key element in smart manufacturing. Human action recognition plays a key role in the realization ofHRC, as it helps identify current human action and provides the basis for future action prediction and robot planning. While Deep Learning (DL) has demonstrated great potential in advancing human action recognition, effectively leveraging the temporal information of human motions to improve the accuracy and robustness of action recognition has remained as a challenge. Furthermore, it is often difficult to obtain a large volume of data for DL network training and optimization, due to operational constraints in a realistic manufacturing setting. This paper presents an integrated method to address these two challenges, based on the optical flow and convolutional neural network (CNN)based transfer learning. Specifically, optical flow images, which encode the temporal information of human motion, are extracted and serve as the input to a two-stream CNN structure for simultaneous parsing of spatial-temporal information of human motion. Subsequently, transfer learning is investigated to transfer the feature extraction capability of a pre-trained CNN to manufacturing scenarios. Evaluation using engine block assemblymore »
A Learning-based Adjustable Autonomy Framework for Human-Robot Collaboration
In this paper, an adjustable autonomy framework is proposed for Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) in which a robot uses a reinforcement learning mechanism guided by a human operator's rewards in an initially unknown workspace. Within the proposed framework, the robot can adjust its autonomy level in an HRC setting that is represented by a Markov Decision Process. A novel Q-learning mechanism with an integrated greedy approach is implemented for robot learning to capture the correct actions and the robot's mistakes for adjusting its autonomy level. The proposed HRC framework can adapt to changes in the workspace, and can adjust the autonomy level, provided consistent human operator's reward. The developed algorithm is applied to a realistic HRC setting, involving a Baxter humanoid robot. The experimental results confirm the capability of the developed framework to successfully adjust the robot's autonomy level in response to changes in the human operator's commands or the workspace.
- Award ID(s):
- 1832110
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10326308
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 1 to 1
- ISSN:
- 1551-3203
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Publisher's Version of Record
- https://doi.org/10.1109/TII.2022.3145567
