Title
Robot Anticipation Learning System for Ball Catching
Abstract
Catching flying objects is a challenging task in human-robot interaction. Traditional techniques predict the intersection position and time using the information obtained during the free-flying ball motion. A common pain point in these systems is the short ball flight time and uncertainties in the ball's trajectory estimation. In this paper, we present the Robot Anticipation Learning System (RALS) that accounts for the information obtained from observation of the thrower's hand motion before the ball is released. RALS takes extra time for the robot to start moving in the direction of the target before the opponent finishes throwing. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first robot control system for ball-catching with anticipation skills. Our results show that the information fused from both throwing and flying motions improves the ball-catching rate by up to 20% compared to the baseline approach, with the predictions relying only on the information acquired during the flight phase.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.3390/robotics10040113
ROBOTICS
Keywords
DocType
Volume
human-robot interaction, ball catching, trajectory prediction, anticipation learning, neural network
Journal
10
Issue
Citations 
PageRank 
4
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Diogo Carneiro100.34
Filipe Silva200.34
Petia Georgieva300.34