Learn to Predict How Humans Manipulate Large-Sized Objects From Interactive Motions

Understanding human intentions during interactions has been a long-lasting theme, that has applications in human-robot interaction, virtual reality and surveillance. In this study, we focus on full-body human interactions with large-sized daily objects and aim to predict the future states of objects and humans given a sequential observation of human-object interaction. As there is no such dataset dedicated to full-body human interactions with large-sized daily objects, we collected a large-scale dataset containing thousands of interactions for training and evaluation purposes. We also observe that an object's intrinsic physical properties are useful for the object motion prediction, and thus design a set of object dynamic descriptors to encode such intrinsic properties. We treat the object dynamic descriptors as a new modality and propose a graph neural network, HO-GCN, to fuse motion data and dynamic descriptors for the prediction task. We show the proposed network that consumes dynamic descriptors can achieve state-of-the-art prediction results and help the network better generalize to unseen objects. We also demonstrate the predicted results are useful for human-robot collaborations.

Automated summary

This study focuses on predicting the future states of objects and humans in full-body interactions with large-sized daily objects. A large-scale dataset is collected for training and evaluation, and a graph neural network is proposed to fuse motion data and dynamic descriptors for the prediction task. The results demonstrate that the proposed network achieves state-of-the-art prediction results and is useful for human-robot collaborations.