Scene perception and recognition for human-robot co-operation

Abstract

In this paper, an intuitive interface for collaborative tasks involving a human and a standard industrial robot is presented. The target for this interface is a worker who is experienced in manufacturing processes but has no experience in conventional industrial robot programming. Physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) and interactive GUI control using hand gestures offered by this interface allows this novice user to instruct industrial robots with ease. This interface combines state of the art perception capabilities with first order logic reasoning to generate semantic description of the process plan. This semantic representation creates the possibility of including human and robot tasks in the same plan and also reduces the complexity of problem analysis by allowing process planning at semantic level, thereby isolating the problem description and analysis from the execution and scenario-specific parameters. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.