Toward Adaptive Guidance: Modeling the Variety of User Behaviors in Continuous-Skill-Improving Experiences of Machine Operation Tasks

An adaptive guidance system that supports equipment operators requires a comprehensive model of task and user behavior that considers different skill and knowledge levels as well as diverse situations. In this study, we investigated the relationships between user behaviors and skill levels under operational conditions. We captured sixty samples of two sewing tasks performed by five operators using a head-mounted RGB-d camera and a static gaze tracker. We examined the operators' gaze and head movements, and hand interactions to essential regions (hotspots on machine surface) to determine behavioral differences among continuous skill improving experiences. We modeled the variety of user behaviors to an extensive task model with a two-step automatic approach, baseline model selection and experience integration. The experimental results indicate that some features, such as task execution time and user head movements, are good indexes for skill level and provide valuable information that can be applied to obtain an effective task model. Operators with varying knowledge and operating habits demonstrate different operational features, which can contribute to the design of user-specific guidance.

Hand Orientation Estimation in Probability Density Form

Hand orientation is an essential feature required to understand hand behaviors and subsequently support human activities. In this paper, we present a new method for estimating hand orientation in probability density form. It can solve the cyclicity problem in direct angular representation and enables the integration of multiple predictions based on different features. We validated the performance of the proposed method and an integration example using our dataset, which captured cooperative group work.

Detecting Clues for Skill Levels and Machine Operation Difficulty from Egocentric Vision

With respect to machine operation tasks, the experiences from different skill level operators, especially novices, can provide worthy understanding about the manner in which they perceive the operational environment and formulate knowledge to deal with various operation situations. In this study, we describe the operator's behaviors by utilizing the relations among their head, hand, and operation location (hotspot) during the operation. A total of 40 experiences associated with a sewing machine operation task performed by amateur operators was recorded via a head-mounted RGB-D camera. We examined important features of operational behaviors in different skill level operators and confirmed their correlation to the difficulties of the operation steps. The result shows that the pure-gazing behavior is significantly reduced when the operator's skill improved. Moreover, the hand-approaching duration and the frequency of attention movement before operation are strongly correlated to the operational difficulty in such machine operating environments.