Real-time Anticipation and Entrainment in Human-Robot Interaction
Name
Fourie-ckfourie-PHD-AeroAstro-2024-thesis.pdf
Description
Thesis PDF
Size
20.62 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
c1c26e4460fa9c795ed95470cd98f40e
Author(s)
Fourie, Christopher Kurt
Advisor(s)
Shah, Julie A.
Date Issued
May 2024
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
In this work, reactive control methodologies, alongside real-time methodologies for dense human motion prediction, are utilized to facilitate real-time anticipation and entrainment in human robot interaction. The technical contributions of this thesis include: extensions to dynamical systems-based modulation approaches that enable real-time circumnavigation of non-convex obstacles (NOMAD), a trajectory clustering approach based on a relaxation of dynamic time warping (TRACER), a real-time human modelling and prediction approach (HABITS), and the integration of these technologies into an anticipation and entrainment controller that enables real-time adaptive synchronization between a human and a robot. NOMAD introduces several on-manifold strategies that enable real-time navigation in the presence of non-convex obstacles, alongside a methodology for the eff icient representation of dense environments that can represent up to 240k points while maintaining a 1ms loop. TRACER is a probabilistic trajectory clustering algorithm that uses the expectation-maximization algorithm and a relaxation of dynamic time warping (Soft-DTW), with demonstrable improvement over non-probabilistic techniques such as kMedoids or DBSCAN. HABITS is an event-driven probabilistic filtering and incremental profiling framework that provides robust segmentation, prediction, and alignment estimation in real-time (25Hz) for emergent interactions in structured settings. The combination of these technologies is then demonstrated to enable both effective real-time anticipation (de-conflicting a workspace), as well as to support entrainment (long-term human-robot synchronization) in human-robot interaction.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
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