Annual Report 2002 - Örebro universitet

Annual Report 2002 59
Project: Human-Robot Cooperation
Project leader: Tom Duckett
Project staff: Grzegorz Cielniak
Funding: KK and Faculty funding.
Cooperation: research visit by Grzegorz Cielniak to the AI Lab, University of Freiburg,
Germany as a Marie Curie Fellow (Oct 2002 – Jan 2003), with Prof. Wolfram
Burgard.
Synopsis:
The ability to interact with people is an important requirement for robots, which operate in
populated environments. In tasks such as cleaning, housekeeping, rehabilitation, entertainment,
inspection and surveillance, so-called service robots need to communicate and
cooperate with people. To enable this interaction, the robot needs to know how many people
there are in the neighbourhood, their position, and who they are (the three fundamental
problems of recognition, tracking and identification). This project investigates embedded
machine learning algorithms for robot-human cooperation. In current work, we are integrating
different methods for recognition, tracking and identification of people by a mobile robot
using vision and laser range-finder sensors. Possible themes for future research include
recognition, interpretation and prediction of human behaviour; and development of natural
language or gesture-based interfaces for communicating tasks to robots.
Results in 2002:
- Experiments on human identification using vision.
- Development of a learning system for recognizing, tracking and identifying several
humans in an office environment using Abstract Hidden Markov Models (AHMMs),
paper submitted to IJCAI’03.
Future developments:
- Scaling up of the AHMM system, and improved techniques for human identification, e.g.,
incorporating face recognition, gait recognition, etc.
- Development of a complete application “the Robotic Security Guard”, which should be
capable of recognizing AASS members and tracking their movements, while raising the
alarm if unauthorized persons enter the environment.
- Licentiate thesis: expected 2003 (Grzegorz Cielniak)
- PhD-thesis: expected 2005 (Grzegorz Cielniak)