Generalising human demonstration data by identifying affordance symmetries in object interaction trajectories

This paper concerns modelling human hand or tool trajectories when interacting with everyday objects. In these interactions symmetries may be exhibited in portions of the trajectories which can be used to identify task space redundancy. This paper presents a formal description of a set of these symmetries, which we term affordance symmetries, and a method to identify them in multiple demonstration recordings. The approach is robust to arbitrary motion before and after the symmetry artifact and relies only on recorded trajectory data. To illustrate the method's performance two examples are discussed involving two different types of symmetries. An simple illustration of the application of the concept in reproduction planning is also provided.