Visual Sensing for Natural Human-Robot Interaction
ETRI Intelligence Robot Research
Division
Vision is clearly an important element
of human-human communication.
Body language such as
facial expressions, silent nods
and other gestures
add important information
in human-to-human dialog.
We expect it can do the
same in human-robot interaction. The robot should always be able
to provide answers to questions
such as "Where am I?",
"Are there
people?", "Who are they?", "Am I being called?" and so on. To answer these
questions,
the robot should have following essential capabilities.
Awareness :
An assistive robot should always
locate and identify
individuals, interpret human motion and actions
and also know the
position of itself.
Communication
:
To interact with humans, including its master, the robot should understand
face and gesture signals
from a human and respond to them with other
gestures, such as “I understood”, “I am going to”.
Decision
:
After
it receives the commands
from its master, the robot should decide “What should I do next?” and
finally
respond to the commands with some gestures of acknowledgement.
We will develop a
robust and persistent 3-D based vision system to support these
capabilities through the joint research project
between USC and ETRI
as
following tasks.
Long range interaction :
Detecting and Tracking of human
Short
range interaction : Pose estimation & gesture recognition
Position estimation :
Recognizing the position of its master and itself
Integration : Porting on real
robot
Gérard Medioni (Project Leader)
Isaac Cohen (Research assistant professor)
Alex François (Research assistant professor)
Hosub Yoon (Visiting Researcher)