Recurrent Neural Networks for Inferring Intentions in Shared Tasks for Industrial Collaborative Robots

Industrial robots are evolving to work closely with humans in shared spaces. Hence, robotic tasks are increasingly shared between humans and robots in collaborative settings. To enable a fluent human robot collaboration, robots need to predict and respond in real-time to worker's intentions. We present a method for early decision using force information. Forces are provided naturally by the user through the manipulation of a shared object in a collaborative task. The proposed algorithm uses a recurrent neural network to recognize operator's intentions. The algorithm is evaluated in terms of action recognition on a force dataset. It excels at detecting intentions when partial data is provided, enabling early detection and facilitating a quick robot reaction.