In-home and remote use of robotic body surrogates by people with profound motor deficits

By controlling robots comparable to the human body, people with profound motor deficits could potentially perform a variety of physical tasks for themselves, improving their quality of life. The extent to which this is achievable has been unclear due to the lack of suitable interfaces by which to control robotic body surrogates and a dearth of studies involving substantial numbers of people with profound motor deficits. We developed a novel, web-based augmented reality interface that enables people with profound motor deficits to remotely control a PR2 mobile manipulator from Willow Garage, which is a human-scale, wheeled robot with two arms. We then conducted two studies to investigate the use of robotic body surrogates. In the first study, 15 novice users with profound motor deficits from across the United States controlled a PR2 in Atlanta, GA to perform a modified Action Research Arm Test (ARAT) and a simulated self-care task. Participants achieved clinically meaningful improvements on the ARAT and 12 of 15 participants (80%) successfully completed the simulated self-care task. Participants agreed that the robotic system was easy to use, was useful, and would provide a meaningful improvement in their lives. In the second study, one expert user with profound motor deficits had free use of a PR2 in his home for seven days. He performed a variety of self-care and household tasks, and also used the robot in novel ways. Taking both studies together, our results suggest that people with profound motor deficits can improve their quality of life using robotic body surrogates, and that they can gain benefit with only low-level robot autonomy and without invasive interfaces. However, methods to reduce the rate of errors and increase operational speed merit further investigation.Comment: 43 Pages, 13 Figure

Comparing Usability of User Interfaces for Robotic Telepresence

In the last years, robotic telepresence solutions have received a significant attention from both the commercial and academic worlds, due to their ability to allow people to feel physically present at a remote place and move in it. Operating a mobile robot with some autonomous capabilities from distance can enable a wide range of mass-market applications, encompassing teleconferencing, virtual tourism, etc. In these scenarios, the possibility to interact with the robot in a natural way becomes of crucial importance. The aim of this paper is to investigate, through a comparative analysis, the usability of two major approaches used today for controlling telepresence robots, i.e., keyboard and point-and-click video navigation. A control system featuring the above interfaces plus a combination of the two has been developed, and applied to the operation of a prototype telepresence robot in an office scenario. The system additionally includes functionalities found in many research and industry solutions, like map-based localization and "augmented" navigation. Then, a user study has been performed to assess the usability of the various control modalities for the execution of some navigation tasks in the considered context. The study provided precious indications to be possibly exploited for guiding next developments in the field

Safe, Remote-Access Swarm Robotics Research on the Robotarium

This paper describes the development of the Robotarium -- a remotely accessible, multi-robot research facility. The impetus behind the Robotarium is that multi-robot testbeds constitute an integral and essential part of the multi-agent research cycle, yet they are expensive, complex, and time-consuming to develop, operate, and maintain. These resource constraints, in turn, limit access for large groups of researchers and students, which is what the Robotarium is remedying by providing users with remote access to a state-of-the-art multi-robot test facility. This paper details the design and operation of the Robotarium as well as connects these to the particular considerations one must take when making complex hardware remotely accessible. In particular, safety must be built in already at the design phase without overly constraining which coordinated control programs the users can upload and execute, which calls for minimally invasive safety routines with provable performance guarantees.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 3 code samples, 72 reference

HUMAN CONTROL OF COOPERATING ROBOTS

Advances in robotic technologies and artificial intelligence are allowing robots to emerge fromresearch laboratories into our lives. Experiences with field applications show that we haveunderestimated the importance of human-robot interaction (HRI) and that new problems arise inHRI as robotic technologies expand. This thesis classifies HRI along four dimensions - human,robot, task, and world and illustrates that previous HRI classifications can be successfullyinterpreted as either about one of these elements or about the relationship between two or moreof these elements. Current HRI studies of single-operator single-robot (SOSR) control andsingle-operator multiple-robots (SOMR) control are reviewed using this approach.Human control of multiple robots has been suggested as a way to improve effectiveness inrobot control. Unlike previous studies that investigated human interaction either in low-fidelitysimulations or based on simple tasks, this thesis investigates human interaction with cooperatingrobot teams within a realistically complex environment. USARSim, a high-fidelity game-enginebasedrobot simulator, and MrCS, a distributed multirobot control system, were developed forthis purpose. In the pilot experiment, we studied the impact of autonomy level. Mixed initiativecontrol yielded performance superior to fully autonomous and manual control.To avoid limitation to particular application fields, the present thesis focuses on commonHRI evaluations that enable us to analyze HRI effectiveness and guide HRI design independentlyof the robotic system or application domain. We introduce the interaction episode (IEP), whichwas inspired by our pilot human-multirobot control experiment, to extend the Neglect ToleranceHUMAN CONTROL OF COOPERATING ROBOTSJijun Wang, Ph.D.University of Pittsburgh, 2007vmodel to support general multiple robots control for complex tasks. Cooperation Effort (CE),Cooperation Demand (CD), and Team Attention Demand (TAD) are defined to measure thecooperation in SOMR control. Two validation experiments were conducted to validate the CDmeasurement under tight and weak cooperation conditions in a high-fidelity virtual environment.The results show that CD, as a generic HRI metric, is able to account for the various factors thataffect HRI and can be used in HRI evaluation and analysis