Human Motion Prediction Using Adaptable Recurrent Neural Networks and Inverse Kinematics

Human motion prediction, especially arm prediction, is critical to facilitate safe and efficient human-robot collaboration (HRC). This letter proposes a novel human motion prediction framework that combines a recurrent neural network (RNN) and inverse kinematics (IK) to predict human arm motion. A modified Kalman filter (MKF) is applied to adapt the model online. The proposed framework is tested on collected human motion data with up to 2 s prediction horizon. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method improves the prediction accuracy by approximately 14% comparing to the state-of-art on seen situations. It stably adapts to unseen situations by keeping the maximum prediction error under 4 cm, which is 70% lower than other methods. Moreover, it is robust when the arm is partially occluded. The wrist prediction remains the same, while the elbow prediction has 20% less variation.