AffectiveVLA: Safe and Intent-Aware VLA Control for Human-Humanoid Social Interaction
Nikita Kuzmin, Georgii Demianchuk, Mariya Lezina, Yara Mahmoud, Iana Zhura, Miguel Altamirano Cabrera, Dzmitry Tsetserukou
原文摘要
Social touch interactions, such as handshakes, fist bumps, and hugs, require humanoid robots to infer human intent, generate contact-rich motions, and maintain safe physical contact. We present AffectiveVLA, an intent-gated Vision-Language-Action (VLA) pipeline deployed on a Unitree G1 humanoid with dexterous hands. A lightweight RGB-based model recognizes interaction intent from two onboard cameras and converts it into a language prompt for the VLA policy. Low-confidence predictions suppress motion execution, reducing unintended activations. During physical contact, interaction-specific compliance profiles adjust arm impedance, while an independent voice-triggered mechanism initiates a latched safe-stop procedure. Using VR teleoperation, we collected approximately 1,300 multimodal interaction episodes and fine-tuned four VLA models: GR00T, RLDX-1, Being-H0.5, and UnifoLM-VLA-0. On-robot evaluation identifies GR00T as the best-performing standalone model. Integrating intent recognition increases its macro-F1 score from 0.75 to 0.90, while the intent model achieves a p95 inference latency of 6.27 ms. These results demonstrate that explicit intent gating improves the reliability of VLA-based social interaction without compromising real-time operation.
cs.RO