Human Motion Prediction for Human-Robot Collaboration

Human motion prediction during human-robot collaboration is critical for achieving safe and efficient interactions in shared environments. Unlike previous studies that have primarily focused on humans and objects, we focus on the robot-aware human motion prediction task, which explicitly models the influence of robots on human motion. This task presents new challenges, such as capturing human-robot heterogeneity and modeling complex spatial interactions. To address these issues, we develop an adaptive interaction network (AINet) model that consists of two branches: a primary branch that predicts future human motion and an auxiliary branch that estimates robot trajectories. The two branches are jointly optimized and coupled via a Local-Global Spatial Interaction (LGSI) Module, which effectively captures fine-grained and global contextual dependencies between human and robot motion sequences. Then, we introduce an Adaptive Weighted Aggregation (AWA) Module to dynamically fuse motion features using context-dependent weights, thereby increasing adaptability across diverse scenarios. Furthermore, we adopt a coarse-to-fine prediction strategy, in which a coarse pseudo-trajectory is first predicted, followed by the refinement of detailed human poses based on that trajectory. Extensive experiments on three challenging datasets reveal that our proposed method achieves superior performance, validating its effectiveness in human-robot collaboration scenarios. Our code is available at: https://github.com/LyTingHub/AINet.

This abstract addresses the incorporation of human motion prediction into proactive and dynamic human-aware motion planning, with the goal of enabling safe collaboration between humans and robots. A deep learning, graph-based model is used to forecast human motion and is integrated into a planning framework. This framework employs a static roadmap along with a time-variant A* algorithm to modify the trajectory of a UR5e manipulator. This method greatly improves human-robot interaction and enables proactive collision avoidance by combining precise motion forecasts with adaptive trajectory planning.

Fluent human--robot collaboration requires robots to continuously estimate human behaviour and anticipate future intentions. This entails reasoning jointly about continuous movements and discrete actions, which are still largely modelled in isolation. In this paper, we introduce MA-HERP, a hierarchical and recursive probabilistic framework for the joint estimation and prediction of human movements and actions. The model combines: (i) a hierarchical representation in which movements compose into actions through admissible Allen interval relations, (ii) a unified probabilistic factorisation coupling continuous dynamics, discrete labels, and durations, and (iii) a recursive inference scheme inspired by Bayesian filtering, alternating top-down action prediction with bottom-up sensory evidence. We present a preliminary experimental evaluation based on neural models trained on musculoskeletal simulations of reaching movements, showing accurate motion prediction, robust action inference under noise, and computational performance compatible with on-line human--robot collaboration.