Gaze is a crucial social cue in any interacting scenario and drives many mechanisms of social cognition (joint and shared attention, predicting human intention and coordinating tasks). Gaze is an indication of social and emotional functions affecting the way the emotions are perceived. Evidence shows that embodied humanoid robots endowed with social abilities can be seen as sophisticated stimuli to study several mechanisms of human social cognition while increasing engagement and ecological validity. In this context, building a robotic perception system to automatically estimate the human gaze only relying on robot’s sensors is still demanding. Main goal of the article is to propose a learning robotic architecture estimating the human gaze direction in table-top scenarios without any external hardware. Table-top tasks are largely used in experimental psychology because they are suitable to implement numerous face-to-face collaborative scenarios. Such an architecture can provide a valuable support in studies where external hardware might represent an obstacle to spontaneous human behaviour, especially in environments less controlled than the laboratory (e.g., in clinical settings). A novel dataset was also collected with the humanoid robot iCub, including images annotated from 24 participants in different gaze conditions.

One of the most important research challenges in upper-limb prosthetics is enhancing the user-prosthesis communication to closely resemble the experience of a natural limb. As prosthetic devices become more complex, users often struggle to control the additional degrees of freedom. In this context, leveraging shared-autonomy principles can significantly improve the usability of these systems. In this paper, we present a novel eye-in-hand prosthetic grasping system that follows these principles. Our system initiates the approach-to-grasp action based on user's command and automatically configures the DoFs of a prosthetic hand. First, it reconstructs the 3D geometry of the target object without the need of a depth camera. Then, it tracks the hand motion during the approach-to-grasp action and finally selects a candidate grasp configuration according to user's intentions. We deploy our system on the Hannes prosthetic hand and test it on able-bodied subjects and amputees to validate its effectiveness. We compare it with a multi-DoF prosthetic control baseline and find that our method enables faster grasps, while simplifying the user experience. Code and demo videos are available online at this https URL.

Most control techniques for prosthetic grasping focus on dexterous fingers control, but overlook the wrist motion. This forces the user to perform compensatory movements with the elbow, shoulder and hip to adapt the wrist for grasping. We propose a computer vision-based system that leverages the collaboration between the user and an automatic system in a shared autonomy framework, to perform continuous control of the wrist degrees of freedom in a prosthetic arm, promoting a more natural approach-to-grasp motion. Our pipeline allows to seamlessly control the prosthetic wrist to follow the target object and finally orient it for grasping according to the user intent. We assess the effectiveness of each system component through quantitative analysis and finally deploy our method on the Hannes prosthetic arm. Code and videos: https: //hsp-iit.github.io/hannes-wrist-control.

5G is being deployed and B5G connectivity is under study and standardization. Benefits brought by the 5G/B5G air interface are numerous and 5G is more than just an evolution of radio technology since it consists of innovative concepts: the application of network softwarization and programmability paradigms to the overall network design, the reduced latency promised by edge computing, or the concept of network slicing. These innovations open the door to new vertical-specific services, even capable of saving more lives. The paper describes four use cases to demonstrate the large-scale trialing of the B5G technology specifically devoted to eHealth and Emergency domains, by supporting the B5G applications in large-scale environments (e.g., hospitals) and bringing novel applications (e.g., Remote Proctoring and Smart Ambulance) and on societal benefits in eHealth and Emergency areas through the development of innovative B5G/6G applications. The work is a part of a more complete behavior, TrialsNet project, within SNS JU European Commission Programme, considering other field of application of B5G connectivity.

Multi-fingered robotic hands have potential to enable robots to perform sophisticated manipulation tasks. However, teaching a robot to grasp objects with an anthropomorphic hand is an arduous problem due to the high dimensionality of state and action spaces. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) offers techniques to design control policies for this kind of problems without explicit environment or hand modeling. However, state-of-the-art model-free algorithms have proven inefficient for learning such policies. The main problem is that the exploration of the environment is unfeasible for such high-dimensional problems, thus hampering the initial phases of policy optimization. One possibility to address this is to rely on off-line task demonstrations, but, oftentimes, this is too demanding in terms of time and computational resources. To address these problems, we propose the A Grasp Pose is All You Need (G-PAYN) method for the anthropomorphic hand of the iCub humanoid. We develop an approach to automatically collect task demonstrations to initialize the training of the policy. The proposed grasping pipeline starts from a grasp pose generated by an external algorithm, used to initiate the movement. Then a control policy (previously trained with the proposed G-PAYN) is used to reach and grab the object. We deployed the iCub into the MuJoCo simulator and use it to test our approach with objects from the YCB-Video dataset. Results show that G-PAYN outperforms current DRL techniques in the considered setting in terms of success rate and execution time with respect to the baselines. The code to reproduce the experiments is released together with the paper with an open source license11https://github.com/hsp-iit/rl-icub-dexterous-manipulation.

We consider the task of object grasping with a prosthetic hand capable of multiple grasp types. In this setting, communicating the intended grasp type often requires a high user cognitive load which can be reduced adopting shared autonomy frameworks. Among these, so-called eye-in-hand systems automatically control the hand pre-shaping before the grasp, based on visual input coming from a camera on the wrist. In this paper, we present an eye-in-hand learning-based approach for hand pre-shape classification from RGB sequences. Differently from previous work, we design the system to support the possibility to grasp each considered object part with a different grasp type. In order to overcome the lack of data of this kind and reduce the need for tedious data collection sessions for training the system, we devise a pipeline for rendering synthetic visual sequences of hand trajectories. We develop a sensorized setup to acquire real human grasping sequences for benchmarking and show that, compared on practical use cases, models trained with our synthetic dataset achieve better generalization performance than models trained on real data. We finally integrate our model on the Hannes prosthetic hand and show its practical effectiveness. We make publicly available the code and dataset to reproduce the presented results11https://github.com/hsp-iit/prosthetic-grasping-simulation.

Deep Learning (DL) based methods for object detection achieve remarkable performance at the cost of computationally expensive training and extensive data labeling. Robots embodiment can be exploited to mitigate this burden by acquiring automatically annotated training data via a natural interaction with a human showing the object of interest, hand-held. However, learning solely from this data may introduce biases (the so-called domain shift), and prevents adaptation to novel tasks. While Weakly-supervised Learning offers a well-established set of techniques to cope with these problems in general-purpose Computer Vision, its adoption in challenging robotic domains is still at a preliminary stage. In this work, we target the scenario of a robot trained in a teacher-learner setting to detect handheld objects. The aim is to improve detection performance in different settings by letting the robot explore the environment with a limited human labeling budget. We compare several techniques for WSL in detection pipelines to reduce model re-training costs without compromising accuracy, proposing solutions which target the considered robotic scenario. We show that the robot can improve adaptation to novel domains, either by interacting with a human teacher (Active Learning) or with an autonomous supervision (Semi-supervised Learning). We integrate our strategies into an on-line detection method, achieving efficient model update capabilities with few labels. We experimentally benchmark our method on challenging robotic object detection tasks under domain shift1.

The visual system of a robot has different requirements depending on the application: it may require high accuracy or reliability, be constrained by limited resources, or need fast adaptation to dynamically changing environments. In this article, we focus on the instance segmentation task and provide a comprehensive study of different techniques that allow adapting an object segmentation model in the presence of novel objects or different domains. We propose a pipeline for fast instance segmentation learning designed for robotic applications where data come in stream. It is based on an hybrid method leveraging on a pre-trained convolutional neural network for feature extraction and fast-to-train Kernel-based classifiers. We also propose a training protocol that allows to shorten the training time by performing feature extraction during the data acquisition. We benchmark the proposed pipeline on two robotics datasets and we deploy it on a real robot, i.e., the iCub humanoid. To this aim, we adapt our method to an incremental setting in which novel objects are learned online by the robot. The code to reproduce the experiments is publicly available on GitHub.11[Online]. Available:https://github.com/hsp-iit/online-detection

Object segmentation is a key component in the visual system of a robot that performs tasks like grasping and object manipulation, especially in presence of occlusions. Like many other computer vision tasks, the adoption of deep architectures has made available algorithms that perform this task with remarkable performance. However, adoption of such algorithms in robotics is hampered by the fact that training requires large amount of computing time and it cannot be performed on-line.In this work, we propose a novel architecture for object segmentation, that overcomes this problem and provides comparable performance in a fraction of the time required by the state-of-the-art methods. Our approach is based on a pre-trained Mask R-CNN, in which various layers have been replaced with a set of classifiers and regressors that are retrained for a new task. We employ an efficient Kernel-based method that allows for fast training on large scale problems. Our approach is validated on the YCB-Video dataset which is widely adopted in the computer vision and robotics community, demonstrating that we can achieve and even surpass performance of the state-of-the-art, with a significant reduction (~6×) of the training time.The code to reproduce the experiments is publicly available on GitHub1.

Latest deep learning methods for object detection provide remarkable performance, but have limits when used in robotic applications. One of the most relevant issues is the long training time, which is due to the large size and imbalance of the associated training sets, characterized by few positive and a large number of negative examples (i.e. background). Proposed approaches are based on end-to-end learning by back-propagation [22] or kernel methods trained with Hard Negatives Mining on top of deep features [8]. These solutions are effective, but prohibitively slow for on-line applications. In this paper we propose a novel pipeline for object detection that overcomes this problem and provides comparable performance, with a 60x training speedup. Our pipeline combines (i) the Region Proposal Network and the deep feature extractor from [22] to efficiently select candidate RoIs and encode them into powerful representations, with (ii) the FALKON [23] algorithm, a novel kernel-based method that allows fast training on large scale problems (millions of points). We address the size and imbalance of training data by exploiting the stochastic subsampling intrinsic into the method and a novel, fast, bootstrapping approach. We assess the effectiveness of the approach on a standard Computer Vision dataset (PASCAL VOC 2007 [5]) and demonstrate its applicability to a real robotic scenario with the iCubWorld Transformations [18] dataset.