Fast Perception for Human-Robot Handovers with Legged Manipulators


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Date

2024-03

Publication Type

Conference Paper

ETH Bibliography

yes

Citations

Altmetric

Data

Abstract

Deploying perception modules for human-robot handovers is challenging because they require a high degree of reactivity, generalizability, and robustness to work reliably for a diversity of cases. Further complications arise as each object can be handed over in a variety of ways, causing occlusions and viewpoint changes. On legged robots, deployment is particularly challenging because of the limited computational resources and the image-space noise resulting from locomotion. In this paper, we introduce an efficient and object-agnostic real time tracking framework, specifically designed for human-to-robot handover tasks with a legged manipulator. The proposed method combines optical flow with Siamese-network-based tracking and depth segmentation in an adaptive Kalman Filter framework. We show that we outperform the state-of-the-art for tracking during human-to-robot handovers with our legged manipulator. We demonstrate the generalizability, reactivity, and robustness of our system through experiments in different scenarios and by carrying out a user study. Additionally, as timing is proven to be more important than spatial accuracy for human-robot handovers, we show that we reach close to human timing performance during the approaching phase, both in terms of objective metrics and subjective feedback from the participants of our user study.

Publication status

published

Editor

Book title

HRI '24: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction

Journal / series

Volume

Pages / Article No.

734 - 742

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

Event

19th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI 2024)

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

legged robotics; physical human-robot interactions; Human-Robot Handover

Organisational unit

09570 - Hutter, Marco / Hutter, Marco check_circle

Notes

Funding

188596 - Perceptive Dynamic Locomotion on Rough Terrain (SNF)

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