Robot Learning of Assistive Manipulation Tasks by Demonstration via Head Gesture-based Interface

Assistive robotic manipulators have the potential to support the lives of people suffering from severe motor impairments. They can support individuals with disabilities to independently perform daily living activities, such as drinking, eating, manipulation tasks, and opening doors. An attractive solution is to enable motor impaired users to teach a robot by providing demonstrations of daily living tasks. The user controls the robot ‘manually’ with an intuitive human-robot interface to provide demonstration, which is followed by the robot learning of the performed task. However, the control of robotic manipulators by motor impaired individuals is a challenging topic. In this paper, a novel head gesture-based interface for hands-free robot control and a framework for robot learning from demonstration are presented. The head gesture-based interface consists of a camera mounted on the user’s hat, which records the changes in the viewed scene due to the head motion. The head gesture recognition is performed using the optical flow for feature extraction and support vector machine for gesture classification. The recognized head gestures are further mapped into robot control commands to perform object manipulation task. The robot learns the demonstrated task by generating the sequence of actions and Gaussian Mixture Model method is used to segment the demonstrated path of the robot’s end-effector. During the robotic reproduction of the task, the modified Gaussian Mixture Model and Gaussian Mixture Regression are used to adapt to environmental changes. The proposed framework was evaluated in a real-world assistive robotic scenario in a small study involving 13 participants; 12 able-bodied and one tetraplegic. The presented results demonstrate a potential of the proposed framework to enable severe motor impaired individuals to demonstrate daily living tasks to robotic manipulators.