Capturing and interpreting human actions for programming robots in the production

Human workers are the most flexible, but also an expensive resource in a production system. In the context of remanufacturing, robots are a cost-effective alternative, but their programming is often not profitable and time-consuming. Programming by demonstration promises a flexible and intuitive alternative that would be feasible even for non-experts, but this first requires capturing and interpreting the human actions. This work presents a multi-sensory robot-supported platform that enables capturing bimanual manipulation actions as well as human poses, hand and gaze movements during manual disassembly tasks. As part of a study, subjects were recorded on this platform during the disassembly of electric motors in order to obtain adequate datasets for the recognition and classification of human actions.