Tactile-Based Human Intent Recognition for Robot Assistive Navigation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Peng, Shaoting, Crowder, Dakarai, Yuan, Wenzhen, Driggs-Campbell, Katherine
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Peng, Shaoting
Crowder, Dakarai
Yuan, Wenzhen
Driggs-Campbell, Katherine
author_facet Peng, Shaoting
Crowder, Dakarai
Yuan, Wenzhen
Driggs-Campbell, Katherine
contents Robot assistive navigation (RAN) is critical for enhancing the mobility and independence of the growing population of mobility-impaired individuals. However, existing systems often rely on interfaces that fail to replicate the intuitive and efficient physical communication observed between a person and a human caregiver, limiting their effectiveness. In this paper, we introduce Tac-Nav, a RAN system that leverages a cylindrical tactile skin mounted on a Stretch 3 mobile manipulator to provide a more natural and efficient interface for human navigational intent recognition. To robustly classify the tactile data, we developed the Cylindrical Kernel Support Vector Machine (CK-SVM), an algorithm that explicitly models the sensor's cylindrical geometry and is consequently robust to the natural rotational shifts present in a user's grasp. Comprehensive experiments were conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our classification algorithm and the overall system. Results show that CK-SVM achieved superior classification accuracy on both simulated (97.1%) and real-world (90.8%) datasets compared to four baseline models. Furthermore, a pilot study confirmed that users more preferred the Tac-Nav tactile interface over conventional joystick and voice-based controls.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_16353
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Tactile-Based Human Intent Recognition for Robot Assistive Navigation
Peng, Shaoting
Crowder, Dakarai
Yuan, Wenzhen
Driggs-Campbell, Katherine
Robotics
Robot assistive navigation (RAN) is critical for enhancing the mobility and independence of the growing population of mobility-impaired individuals. However, existing systems often rely on interfaces that fail to replicate the intuitive and efficient physical communication observed between a person and a human caregiver, limiting their effectiveness. In this paper, we introduce Tac-Nav, a RAN system that leverages a cylindrical tactile skin mounted on a Stretch 3 mobile manipulator to provide a more natural and efficient interface for human navigational intent recognition. To robustly classify the tactile data, we developed the Cylindrical Kernel Support Vector Machine (CK-SVM), an algorithm that explicitly models the sensor's cylindrical geometry and is consequently robust to the natural rotational shifts present in a user's grasp. Comprehensive experiments were conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our classification algorithm and the overall system. Results show that CK-SVM achieved superior classification accuracy on both simulated (97.1%) and real-world (90.8%) datasets compared to four baseline models. Furthermore, a pilot study confirmed that users more preferred the Tac-Nav tactile interface over conventional joystick and voice-based controls.
title Tactile-Based Human Intent Recognition for Robot Assistive Navigation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16353