Attention deep learning based model for predicting the 3D Human Body Pose using the Robot Human Handover Phases

© 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.This work proposes a human motion prediction model for handover operations. We use in this work, the different phases of the handover operation to improve the human motion predictions. Our attention deep learning based model takes into account the position of the robot’s End Effector and the phase in the handover operation to predict future human poses. Our model outputs a distribution of possible positions rather than one deterministic position, a key feature in order to allow robots to collaborate with humans. The attention deep learning based model has been trained and evaluated with a dataset created using human volunteers and an anthropomorphic robot, simulating handover operations where the robot is the giver and the human the receiver. For each operation, the human skeleton is obtained with an Intel RealSense D435i camera attached inside the robot’s head. The results shown a great improvement of the human’s right hand prediction and 3D body compared with other methods.Work supported under the Spanish State Research Agency through the Maria de Maeztu Seal of Excellence to IRI (MDM-2016-0656), the ROCOTRANSP project (PID2019-106702RB-C21 / AEI /10.13039/501100011033)) and the EU project CANOPIES (H2020- ICT-2020-2-101016906)Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft