Tomoaki Nakamura

Issei Saito, Tomoaki Nakamura, Toshiyuki Hatta et al.

Evolving consumer demands and market trends have led to businesses increasingly embracing a production approach that prioritizes flexibility and customization. Consequently, factory workers must engage in tasks that are more complex than before. Thus, productivity depends on each worker's skills in assembling products. Therefore, analyzing the behavior of a worker is crucial for work improvement. However, manual analysis is time consuming and does not provide quick and accurate feedback. Machine learning have been attempted to automate the analyses; however, most of these methods need several labels for training. To this end, we extend the Gaussian process hidden semi-Markov model (GP-HSMM), to enable the rapid and automated analysis of worker behavior without pre-training. The model does not require labeled data and can automatically and accurately segment continuous motions into motion classes. The proposed model is a probabilistic model that hierarchically connects GP-HSMM and HSMM, enabling the extraction of behavioral patterns with different granularities. Furthermore, it mutually infers the parameters between the GP-HSMM and HSMM, resulting in accurate motion pattern extraction. We applied the proposed method to motion data in which workers assembled products at an actual production site. The accuracy of behavior pattern extraction was evaluated using normalized Levenshtein distance (NLD). The smaller the value of NLD, the more accurate is the pattern extraction. The NLD of motion patterns captured by GP-HSMM and HSMM layers in our proposed method was 0.50 and 0.33, respectively, which are the smallest compared to that of the baseline methods.

Issei Saito, Masatoshi Nagano, Tomoaki Nakamura et al.

In this paper, we propose RFF-GP-HSMM, a fast unsupervised time-series segmentation method that incorporates random Fourier features (RFF) to address the high computational cost of the Gaussian process hidden semi-Markov model (GP-HSMM). GP-HSMM models time-series data using Gaussian processes, requiring inversion of an N times N kernel matrix during training, where N is the number of data points. As the scale of the data increases, matrix inversion incurs a significant computational cost. To address this, the proposed method approximates the Gaussian process with linear regression using RFF, preserving expressive power while eliminating the need for inversion of the kernel matrix. Experiments on the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) motion-capture dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves segmentation performance comparable to that of conventional methods, with approximately 278 times faster segmentation on time-series data comprising 39,200 frames.

Tomoaki Nakamura, Takayuki Nagai, Tadahiro Taniguchi

To realize human-like robot intelligence, a large-scale cognitive architecture is required for robots to understand the environment through a variety of sensors with which they are equipped. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named Serket that enables the construction of a large-scale generative model and its inference easily by connecting sub-modules to allow the robots to acquire various capabilities through interaction with their environments and others. We consider that large-scale cognitive models can be constructed by connecting smaller fundamental models hierarchically while maintaining their programmatic independence. Moreover, connected modules are dependent on each other, and parameters are required to be optimized as a whole. Conventionally, the equations for parameter estimation have to be derived and implemented depending on the models. However, it becomes harder to derive and implement those of a larger scale model. To solve these problems, in this paper, we propose a method for parameter estimation by communicating the minimal parameters between various modules while maintaining their programmatic independence. Therefore, Serket makes it easy to construct large-scale models and estimate their parameters via the connection of modules. Experimental results demonstrated that the model can be constructed by connecting modules, the parameters can be optimized as a whole, and they are comparable with the original models that we have proposed.

Tadahiro Taniguchi, Takayuki Nagai, Tomoaki Nakamura et al.

Humans can learn the use of language through physical interaction with their environment and semiotic communication with other people. It is very important to obtain a computational understanding of how humans can form a symbol system and obtain semiotic skills through their autonomous mental development. Recently, many studies have been conducted on the construction of robotic systems and machine-learning methods that can learn the use of language through embodied multimodal interaction with their environment and other systems. Understanding human social interactions and developing a robot that can smoothly communicate with human users in the long term, requires an understanding of the dynamics of symbol systems and is crucially important. The embodied cognition and social interaction of participants gradually change a symbol system in a constructive manner. In this paper, we introduce a field of research called symbol emergence in robotics (SER). SER is a constructive approach towards an emergent symbol system. The emergent symbol system is socially self-organized through both semiotic communications and physical interactions with autonomous cognitive developmental agents, i.e., humans and developmental robots. Specifically, we describe some state-of-art research topics concerning SER, e.g., multimodal categorization, word discovery, and a double articulation analysis, that enable a robot to obtain words and their embodied meanings from raw sensory--motor information, including visual information, haptic information, auditory information, and acoustic speech signals, in a totally unsupervised manner. Finally, we suggest future directions of research in SER.