Abstract:Temporally locating and classifying fine-grained sub-task segments in long, untrimmed videos is crucial to safe human-robot collaboration. Unlike generic activity recognition, collaborative manipulation requires sub-task labels that are directly robot-executable. We present RoboSubtaskNet, a multi-stage human-to-robot sub-task segmentation framework that couples attention-enhanced I3D features (RGB plus optical flow) with a modified MS-TCN employing a Fibonacci dilation schedule to capture better short-horizon transitions such as reach-pick-place. The network is trained with a composite objective comprising cross-entropy and temporal regularizers (truncated MSE and a transition-aware term) to reduce over-segmentation and to encourage valid sub-task progressions. To close the gap between vision benchmarks and control, we introduce RoboSubtask, a dataset of healthcare and industrial demonstrations annotated at the sub-task level and designed for deterministic mapping to manipulator primitives. Empirically, RoboSubtaskNet outperforms MS-TCN and MS-TCN++ on GTEA and our RoboSubtask benchmark (boundary-sensitive and sequence metrics), while remaining competitive on the long-horizon Breakfast benchmark. Specifically, RoboSubtaskNet attains F1 @ 50 = 79.5%, Edit = 88.6%, Acc = 78.9% on GTEA; F1 @ 50 = 30.4%, Edit = 52.0%, Acc = 53.5% on Breakfast; and F1 @ 50 = 94.2%, Edit = 95.6%, Acc = 92.2% on RoboSubtask. We further validate the full perception-to-execution pipeline on a 7-DoF Kinova Gen3 manipulator, achieving reliable end-to-end behavior in physical trials (overall task success approx 91.25%). These results demonstrate a practical path from sub-task level video understanding to deployed robotic manipulation in real-world settings.
Abstract:This paper proposes a novel approach to recognizing dynamic hand gestures facilitating seamless interaction between humans and robots. Here, each robot manipulator task is assigned a specific gesture. There may be several such tasks, hence, several gestures. These gestures may be prone to several dynamic variations. All such variations for different gestures shown to the robot are accurately recognized in real-time using the proposed unsupervised model based on the Gaussian Mixture model. The accuracy during training and real-time testing prove the efficacy of this methodology.