Activity recognition in a Physical Interactive RoboGame

In this paper, we investigate the possibility of human physical activity recognition in a robot game scenario. Being able to recognize types of activity is essential to enable robot behavior adaptation to support player engagement. Also, the introduction of this recognition system will allow for development of better models for prediction, planning and problem solving in PIRGs that can foster human-robot interaction. The experiments reported on this paper were performed on data collected from real in-game activity, where a human player faces a mobile robot. We use a custom single tri-axial accelerometer module attached to the player’s chest in order to capture motion information. The main characteristic of our approach is the extraction of features from patterns found on the motion variance rather than on raw data. Furthermore, we allow for the recognition of unconstrained motion given that we do not ask the players to perform target activities before hand: all detectable activities are derived from the free player motion during the game itself. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to consider activity recognition in a physical interactive robogame.