Interactive Learning-from-Observation through multimodal human demonstration

Learning-from-Observation (LfO) is a robot teaching framework for programming operations through few-shots human demonstration. While most previous LfO systems run with visual demonstration, recent research on robot teaching has shown the effectiveness of verbal instruction in making recognition robust and teaching interactive. To the best of our knowledge, however, few solutions have been proposed for LfO that utilizes verbal instruction, namely multimodal LfO. This paper aims to propose a practical pipeline for multimodal LfO. For input, an user temporally stops hand movements to match the granularity of human instructions with the granularity of robot execution. The pipeline recognizes tasks based on step-by-step verbal instructions accompanied by demonstrations. In addition, the recognition is made robust through interactions with the user. We test the pipeline on a real robot and show that the user can successfully teach multiple operations from multimodal demonstrations. The results suggest the utility of the proposed pipeline for multimodal LfO.