VISION-BASED ROBOT CONTROLLER FOR HUMAN-ROBOT INTERACTION USING PREDICTIVE ALGORITHMS

Abstract: The demand for robots to work in environments together with humans is growing. This calls for new requirements on robots systems, such as the need to be perceived as responsive and accurate in human interactions. This thesis explores the possibility of using AI methods to predict the movement of a human and evaluating if that information can assist a robot with human interactions. The AI methods that were used is a Long Short Term Memory(LSTM) network and an artificial neural network(ANN). Both networks were trained on data from a motion capture dataset and on four different prediction times: 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 and a 1/16 second. The evaluation was performed directly on the dataset to determine the prediction error. The neural networks were also evaluated on a robotic arm in a simulated environment, to show if the prediction methods would be suitable for a real-life system. Both methods show promising results when comparing the prediction error. From the simulated system, it could be concluded that with the LSTM prediction the robotic arm would generally precede the actual position. The results indicate that the methods described in this thesis report could be used as a stepping stone for a human-robot interactive system.