Verbal Focus-of-Attention System for Learning-from-Observation

Understand

The learning-from-observation (LfO) framework aims to map human demonstrations to a robot to reduce programming effort.

• To this end, an LfO system encodes a human demonstration into a series of execution units for a robot, which are referred to as task models.
• Although previous research has proposed successful task-model encoders, there has been little discussion on how to guide a task-model encoder in a scene with spatio-temporal noises, such as cluttered objects or unrelated human body movements.
• Inspired by the function of verbal instructions guiding an observer's visual attention, we propose a verbal focus-of-attention (FoA) system (i.e., spatio-temporal filters) to guide a task-model encoder.