Robust Real-Time Motion Retargeting via Neural Latent Prediction

Abstract

Human-robot motion retargeting is a crucial approach for fast learning motion skills. Achieving real-time retargeting demands high levels of synchronization and accuracy. Even though existing retargeting methods have swift calculation, they still cause time-delay effect on the synchronous retargeting. To mitigate this issue, this paper proposes a motion retargeting method guided by prediction, which effectively reduces the adverse impact of time-delay. The proposed pipeline contains motion retargeting in spatial-temporal graph-based structure and motion prediction in the latent space. The motion sequence retargeting builds mapping and paired data from human poses to corresponding robot configurations for training prediction model, and generated robot motion satisfies limit and self-collision constrains. The controller guided by prediction imports future robot joint motion to achieve advanced trajectory tracking, thereby compensating for delay time spent on calculation and tracking. Experimental results show that our method outperforms other methods in terms of synchronization and similarity. Furthermore, our method exhibits fault-tolerant capability in scenarios involving the loss of human information input.