Exploiting Information Theory for Intuitive Robot Programming of Manual Activities

Abstract

Observational learning is a promising approach to enable people without expertise in programming to transfer skills to robots in a user-friendly manner, since it mirrors how humans learn new behaviors by observing others. Many existing methods focus on instructing robots to mimic human trajectories, but motion-level strategies often pose challenges in skills generalization across diverse environments. This article proposes a novel framework that allows robots to achieve a higher-level understanding of human-demonstrated manual tasks recorded in RGB videos. By recognizing the task structure and goals, robots generalize what observed to unseen scenarios. We found our task representation on Shannon's Information Theory (IT), which is applied for the first time to manual tasks. IT helps extract the active scene elements and quantify the information shared between hands and objects. We exploit scene graph properties to encode the extracted interaction features in a compact structure and segment the demonstration into blocks, streamlining the generation of behavior trees for robot replicas. Experiments validated the effectiveness of IT to automatically generate robot execution plans from a single human demonstration. In addition, we provide HANDSOME, an open-source dataset of HAND Skills demOnstrated by Multi-subjEcts, to promote further research and evaluation in this field.