Towards learning of safety knowledge from human demonstrations

Future autonomous service robots are intended to operate in open and complex environments. This in turn implies complications ensuring safe operation. The tenor of few available investigations is the need for dynamically assessing operational risks. Furthermore, a new kind of hazards being implicated by the robot´s capability to manipulate the environment occurs: hazardous environmental object interactions. One of the open questions in safety research is integrating safety knowledge into robotic systems, enabling these systems behaving safety-conscious in hazardous situations. In this paper a safety procedure is described, in which learning of safety knowledge from human demonstration is considered. Within the procedure, a task is demonstrated to the robot, which observes object-to-object relations and labels situational data as commanded by the human. Based on this data, several supervised learning techniques are evaluated used for finally extracting safety knowledge. Results indicate that Decision Trees allow interesting opportunities.