Integration of Tracking, Re-Identification, and Gesture Recognition for Facilitating Human–Robot Interaction

For successful human–robot collaboration, it is crucial to establish and sustain quality interaction between humans and robots, making it essential to facilitate human–robot interaction (HRI) effectively. The evolution of robot intelligence now enables robots to take a proactive role in initiating and sustaining HRI, thereby allowing humans to concentrate more on their primary tasks. In this paper, we introduce a system known as the Robot-Facilitated Interaction System (RFIS), where mobile robots are employed to perform identification, tracking, re-identification, and gesture recognition in an integrated framework to ensure anytime readiness for HRI. We implemented the RFIS on an autonomous mobile robot used for transporting a patient, to demonstrate proactive, real-time, and user-friendly interaction with a caretaker involved in monitoring and nursing the patient. In the implementation, we focused on the efficient and robust integration of various interaction facilitation modules within a real-time HRI system that operates in an edge computing environment. Experimental results show that the RFIS, as a comprehensive system integrating caretaker recognition, tracking, re-identification, and gesture recognition, can provide an overall high quality of interaction in HRI facilitation with average accuracies exceeding 90% during real-time operations at 5 FPS.