A framework for robotic clothing assistance by imitation learning

摘要

The recent demographic trend across developed nations shows a dramatic increase in the aging population, fallen fertility rates and a shortage of caregivers. Hence, the demand for service robots to assist with dressing which is an essential Activity of Daily Living (ADL) is increasing rapidly. Robotic Clothing Assistance is a challenging task since the robot has to deal with two demanding tasks simultaneously, (a) non-rigid and highly flexible cloth manipulation and (b) safe human-robot interaction while assisting humans whose posture may vary during the task. On the other hand, humans can deal with these tasks rather easily. In this paper, we propose a framework for robotic clothing assistance by imitation learning from a human demonstration to a compliant dual-arm robot. In this framework, we divide the dressing task into three phases, i.e. reaching phase, arm dressing phase, and body dressing phase. We model the arm dressing phase as a global trajectory modification using Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMP), while we model the body dressing phase toward a local trajectory modification applying Bayesian Gaussian Process Latent Variable Model (BGPLVM). We show that the proposed framework developed towards assisting the elderly is generalizable to various people and successfully performs a sleeveless shirt dressing task. We also present participants feedback on public demonstration at the International Robot Exhibition (iREX) 2017. To our knowledge, this is the first work performing a full dressing of a sleeveless shirt on a human subject with a humanoid robot.