iTeach: In the Wild Interactive Teaching for Failure-Driven Adaptation of Robot Perception

Abstract:We present iTeach, a deployable system that lets any co-located human fix a robot's perception failures on the spot without expertise, a workstation, or offline retraining. The operator wears a mixed reality (MR) headset, sees the robot's segmentation predictions overlaid on the real scene, and corrects failures hands-free: rearranging objects (HumanPlay), annotating via gaze and voice, and triggering SAM2 backward mask propagation. Each ~20 s interaction yields 150-300 densely labeled training frames; the system fine-tunes the perception model onboard, keeps the better model, and redeploys, all without leaving the deployment site. The full loop requires only an RGB-D camera, onboard GPU, and an MR headset: any mobile robot, any environment. Starting from 26.1 on cluttered real-world scenes, 45 teaching interactions (13K frames) raise segmentation to 80.7 with no catastrophic forgetting; on three standard benchmarks the model never trained on, performance improves as well. Downstream pick-and-place on SceneReplica reaches 72/100, surpassing a model-based pipeline requiring CAD models. A 12-participant user study confirms non-experts match experts on annotation accuracy (~95% box IoU), speed, and task load (NASA-TLX 21/100). The framework is architecture-agnostic: any fine-tunable perception model can serve as backbone.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2410.09072 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2410.09072v5 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2410.09072 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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