Eating is an essential activity of daily living (ADL) for staying healthy and living at home independently. Although numerous assistive devices have been introduced, many people with disabilities are still restricted from independent eating due to the devices' physical or perceptual limitations. In this work, we introduce a new meal-assistance system using a general-purpose mobile manipulator, a Willow Garage PR2, which has the potential to serve as a versatile form of assistive technology. Our active feeding framework enables the robot to autonomously deliver food to the user's mouth. In detail, our web-based user interface, visually-guided behaviors, and safety tools allow people with severe motor impairments to benefit from the robotic assistance. We evaluated our system with 10 able-bodied participants and 9 people with motor impairments. Both groups of participants successfully ate various foods using the system and reported high rates of success for the system's autonomous behaviors in a laboratory environment. Then, we performed in-home evaluation with Henry Evans, a person with quadriplegia, at his house in California, USA. In general, Henry and the other people who operated the system reported that it was comfortable, safe, and easy-to-use. We discuss learned lessons and design insights through user evaluations.
The absence of mobility is an important issue in robotic assistance. found that movement of a mobile manipulator's base was needed to provide assistance with a shaving task, since the PR2 that they used could not otherwise reach the relevant locations @cite_26 . In feeding, the fixed robot base often requires the relocation of the robot or user by caregivers in the beginning or during the task. A fixed base restricts the scope of assistive tasks @cite_64 . Without mobility, robots are restricted to a narrow set of tasks and are unable to leave the immediate vicinity of the human to provide assistance elsewhere. Recent studies have introduced general-purpose mobile manipulators for various assistive robotic tasks, including shaving @cite_46 @cite_39 , dressing @cite_66 @cite_2 @cite_40 , fetch-and-carry @cite_19 @cite_12 @cite_59 @cite_50 , and guiding tasks @cite_4 . Our meal-assistance system has a mobile base that has the potential to enhance the quality of feeding assistance.
@cite_26 @cite_64 @cite_4 @cite_39 @cite_19 @cite_40 @cite_59 @cite_2 @cite_50 @cite_46 @cite_66 @cite_12
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Human-scale mobile robots with arms have the potential to assist people with a variety of tasks. We present a proof-of-concept system that has enabled a person with severe quadriplegia named Henry Evans to shave himself in his own home using a general purpose mobile manipulator (PR2 from Willow Garage). The robot primarily provides assistance by holding a tool (e.g., an electric shaver) at user-specified locations around the user's head, while he she moves his her head against it. If the robot detects forces inappropriate for the task (e.g., shaving), it withdraws the tool. The robot also holds a mirror with its other arm, so that the user can see what he she is doing. For all aspects of the task, the robot and the human work together. The robot uses a series of distinct semi-autonomous subsystems during the task to navigate to poses next to the wheelchair, attain initial arm configurations, register a 3D model of the person's head, move the tool to coarse semantically-labeled tool poses (e.g, “Cheek”), and finely position the tool via incremental movements. Notably, while moving the tool near the user's head, the robot uses an ellipsoidal coordinate system attached to the 3D head model. In addition to describing the complete robotic system, we report results from Henry Evans using it to shave both sides of his face while sitting in his wheelchair at home. He found the process to be long (54 minutes) and the interface unintuitive. Yet, he also found the system to be comfortable to use, felt safe while using it, was satisfied with it, and preferred it to a human caregiver. When a mobile manipulator functions as an assistive device, the robot's initial configuration and the configuration of the environment can impact the robot's ability to provide effective assistance. Selecting initial configurations for assistive tasks can be challenging due to the high number of degrees of freedom of the robot, the environment, and the person, as well as the complexity of the task. In addition, rapid selection of initial conditions can be important, so that the system will be responsive to the user and will not require the user to wait a long time while the robot makes a decision. To address these challenges, we present Task-centric initial Configuration Selection (TCS), which unlike previous work uses a measure of task-centric manipulability to accommodate state estimation error, considers various environmental degrees of freedom, and can find a set of configurations from which a robot can perform a task. TCS performs substantial offline computation, so that it can rapidly provide solutions at run time. At run time, the system performs an optimization over candidate initial configurations using a utility function that can include factors such as movement costs for the robot's mobile base. To evaluate TCS, we created models of 11 activities of daily living (ADLs) and evaluated TCS's performance with these 11 assistive tasks in a computer simulation of a PR2, a robotic bed, and a model of a human body. TCS performed as well or better than a baseline algorithm in all of our tests against state estimation error. Robotic systems have been widely used in many areas to assist human beings. Mobile manipulators are among the most popular choices. This paper investigates human assistance systems using a mobile manipulator, for example, to guide the blind and to transport objects. Distinct from existing systems, an integrated dynamic model and controller of the mobile manipulator are designed. Singularity, manipulability and safety are all considered in the system design. Furthermore, two human assistance modes - Robot-Human mode and Teleoperator- Robot-Human mode - are designed and analysed. The Teleoperator-Robot-Human mode can integrate human intelligence into the assistance system to further enhance the system efficiency and safety. The experimental results implemented on a mobile manipulator demonstrated the effectiveness of the designed systems. In this paper the mechanism, design, and control system of a new humanoid-type hand with human-like manipulation abilities is discussed. The hand is designed for the humanoid robot which has to work autonomously or interactively in cooperation with humans. The ideal end effector for such a humanoid would be able to use the tools and objects that a person uses when working in the same environment. Therefore, a new hand is designed for anatomical consistency with the human hand. This includes the number of fingers and the placement and motion of the thumb, the proportions of the link lengths, and the shape of the palm. The hand can perform most of human grasping types. In this paper, particular attention is dedicated to measurement analysis, technical characteristics, and functionality of the hand prototype. Furthermore, first experience gained from using hand prototypes on a humanoid robot is outlined. Assistive mobile manipulators (AMMs) have the potential to one day serve as surrogates and helpers for people with disabilities, giving them the freedom to perform tasks such as scratching an itch, picking up a cup, or socializing with their families. This paper describes dressing assistance by an autonomous robot. We especially focus on a dressing action that is particularly problematic for disabled people: the pulling of a bottom along the legs. To avoid injuring the subject's legs, the robot should recognize the state of the manipulated clothing. Therefore, while handling the clothing, the robot is supplied with both visual and force sensory information. Based on the them, dressing failure is detected and recovery from the failure is planned automatically. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is implemented and validated in a life-sized humanoid robot.