An efficient activity recognition for homecare robots from multi-modal communication dataset

Abstract

Human environments are designed and managed by humans for humans. Thus, adding robots to interact with humans and perform specific tasks appropriately is an essential topic in robotics research. In recent decades, object recognition, human skeletal, and face recognition frameworks have been implemented to support the tasks of robots. However, recognition of activities and interactions between humans and surrounding objects is an ongoing and more challenging problem. Therefore, this study proposed a graph neural network (GNN) approach to directly recognize human activity at home using vision and speech teaching data. Focus was given to the problem of classifying three activities, namely, eating, working, and reading, where these activities were conducted in the same environment. From the experiments, observations, and analyses, this proved to be quite a challenging problem to solve using only traditional convolutional neural networks (CNN) and video datasets. In the proposed method, an activity classification was learned from a 3D detected object corresponding to the human position. Next, human utterances were used to label the activity from the collected human and object 3D positions. The experiment, involving data collection and learning, was demonstrated by using human-robot communication. It was shown that the proposed method had the shortest training time of 100.346 seconds with 6000 positions from the dataset and was able to recognize the three activities more accurately than the deep layer aggregation (DLA) and X3D networks with video datasets.

Keywords

• homecare robots
• activity prediction
• graph neural network
• rgb-d camera
• ros