Real-Time Human-Robot Interaction for a Service Robot Based on 3D Human Activity Recognition and Human-mimicking Decision Mechanism

Abstract: This paper describes the development of a real-time Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) system for a service robot based on 3D human activity recognition and human-like decision mechanism. The Human-Robot Interactive (HRI) system, which allows one person to interact with a service robot using natural body language, collects sequences of 3D skeleton joints comprising rich human movement information about the user via Microsoft Kinect. This information is used to train a three-layer Long-Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network for human action recognition. The robot understands user intent based on an online LSTM network test, and responds to the user via movements of the robotic arm or chassis. Furthermore, the human-like decision mechanism is also fused into this process, which allows the robot to instinctively decide whether to interrupt the current task according to task priority. The framework of the overall system is established on the Robot Operating System (ROS) platform. The real-life activity interaction between our service robot and the user was conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of developed HRI system.