Human-Robot Interaction Method Combining Human Pose Estimation and Motion Intention Recognition

Although human pose estimation technology based on RGB images is becoming more and more mature, most of the current mainstream methods rely on depth camera to obtain human joints information. These interaction frameworks are affected by the infrared detection distance so that they cannot well adapt to the interaction scene of different distance. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to build a modular interactive framework based on RGB images, which aims to alleviate the problem of high dependence on depth camera and low adaptability to distance in the current human-robot interaction (HRI) framework based on human body by using advanced human pose estimation technology. To enhance the adaptability of the HRI framework to different distances, we adopt optical cameras instead of depth cameras as acquisition equipment. Firstly, the human joints information is extracted by a human pose estimation network. Then, a joints sequence filter is designed in the intermediate stage to reduce the influence of unreasonable skeletons on the interaction results. Finally, a human intention recognition model is built to recognize the human intention from reasonable joints information, and drive the robot to respond according to the predicted intention. The experimental results show that our interactive framework is more robust in the distance than the framework based on depth camera and is able to achieve effective interaction under different distances, illuminations, costumes, customers, and scenes.