Bio-Inspired Vision and Gesture-Based Robot-Robot Interaction for Human-Cooperative Package Delivery

This research presents a novel bio-inspired framework for two robots interacting together for a cooperative package delivery task with a human-in the-loop. It contributes to eliminating the need for network-based robot-robot interaction in constrained environments. An individual robot is instructed to move in specific shapes with a particular orientation at a certain speed for the other robot to infer using object detection (custom YOLOv4) and depth perception. The shape is identified by calculating the area occupied by the detected polygonal route. A metric for the area’s extent is calculated and empirically used to assign regions for specific shapes and gives an overall accuracy of 93.3% in simulations and 90% in a physical setup. Additionally, gestures are analyzed for their accuracy of intended direction, distance, and the target coordinates in the map. The system gives an average positional RMSE of 0.349 in simulation and 0.461 in a physical experiment. A video demonstration of the problem statement along with the simulations and experiments for real world applications has been given here and in Supplementary Material.