ILeSiA: Interactive Learning of Robot Situational Awareness From Camera Input

Learning from demonstration is a promising approach for teaching robots new skills. However, a central challenge in the execution of acquired skills is the ability to recognize faults and prevent failures. This is essential because demonstrations typically cover only a limited set of scenarios and often only the successful ones. During task execution, unforeseen situations may arise, such as changes in the robot's environment or interaction with human operators. To recognize such situations, this letter focuses on teaching the robot situational awareness by using a camera input and labeling frames as safe or risky. We train a Gaussian Process (GP) regression model fed by a low-dimensional latent space representation of the input images. The model outputs a continuous risk score ranging from zero to one, quantifying the degree of risk at each timestep. This allows for pausing task execution in unsafe situations and directly adding new training data, labeled by the human user. Our experiments on a robotic manipulator show that the proposed method can reliably detect both known and novel faults using only a single example for each new fault. In contrast, a standard multi-layer perceptron (MLP) performs well only on faults it has encountered during training. Our method enables the next generation of cobots to be rapidly deployed with easy-to-set-up, vision-based risk assessment, proactively safeguarding humans and detecting misaligned parts or missing objects before failures occur.