Proactive Robot Assistance via Spatio-Temporal Object Modeling

Maithili Patel, Sonia Chernova

Keywords: Proactive Robot Assistance, Spatio-Temporal Object Tracking

TL;DR: A graph translation network based model that can learn to predict robot actions by modeling future movement of objects in an environment resulting from the user’s routine activities, enabling a robot to assist proactively, without being asked.

Abstract: Proactive robot assistance enables a robot to anticipate and provide for a user's needs without being explicitly asked. We formulate proactive assistance as the problem of the robot anticipating temporal patterns of object movements associated with everyday user routines, and proactively assisting the user by placing objects to adapt the environment to their needs. We introduce a generative graph neural network to learn a unified spatio-temporal predictive model of object dynamics from temporal sequences of object arrangements. We additionally contribute the Household Object Movements from Everyday Routines (HOMER) dataset, which tracks household objects associated with human activities of daily living across 50+ days for five simulated households. Our model outperforms the leading baseline in predicting object movement, correctly predicting locations for 11.1% more objects and wrongly predicting locations for 11.5% fewer objects used by the human user.

Student First Author: yes

Code: https://github.com/Maithili/SpatioTemporalObjectTracking

Community Implementations: [ 2 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2211.15501/code)