Towards Assistive Feeding with a General-Purpose Mobile Manipulator

General-purpose mobile manipulators have the potential to serve as a versatile form of assistive technology. However, their complexity creates challenges, including the risk of being too difficult to use. We present a proof-of-concept robotic system for assistive feeding that consists of a Willow Garage PR2, a high-level web-based interface, and specialized autonomous behaviors for scooping and feeding yogurt. As a step towards use by people with disabilities, we evaluated our system with 5 able-bodied participants. All 5 successfully ate yogurt using the system and reported high rates of success for the system's autonomous behaviors. Also, Henry Evans, a person with severe quadriplegia, operated the system remotely to feed an able-bodied person. In general, people who operated the system reported that it was easy to use, including Henry. The feeding system also incorporates corrective actions designed to be triggered either autonomously or by the user. In an offline evaluation using data collected with the feeding system, a new version of our multimodal anomaly detection system outperformed prior versions.Comment: This short 4-page paper was accepted and presented as a poster on May. 16, 2016 in ICRA 2016 workshop on 'Human-Robot Interfaces for Enhanced Physical Interactions' organized by Arash Ajoudani, Barkan Ugurlu, Panagiotis Artemiadis, Jun Morimoto. It was peer reviewed by one reviewe

Lyapunov Self-triggered Controller for Nonlinear Trajectory Tracking of Unicycle-type Robot

This paper focuses on the design and implementation of an aperiodic control of nonholonomic robots tracking nonlinear trajectories. The main objective of our controller is to reduce the number of updates while preserving control performance guarantees. To solve the problem in a more efficient way, we design two aperiodic control solutions, one to reach a target point and a second to track a predefined nonlinear trajectory. Unlike most previous work, our triggering condition only updates the controller when the time derivative of the Lyapunov function becomes nonnegative, without taking into account the measurement error. Multiple simulated results with different initial conditions are included, showing how our control solution significantly reduces the need for communication in comparison with periodic and other aperiodic strategies while preserving a desired tracking performance. To validate the proposal experimental tests of each control technique with a P3-DX robot remotely controlled through an IEEE 802.11g wireless network are also carried out

Tactile Interactions with a Humanoid Robot : Novel Play Scenario Implementations with Children with Autism

Acknowledgments: This work has been partially supported by the European Commission under contract number FP7-231500-ROBOSKIN. Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.The work presented in this paper was part of our investigation in the ROBOSKIN project. The project has developed new robot capabilities based on the tactile feedback provided by novel robotic skin, with the aim to provide cognitive mechanisms to improve human-robot interaction capabilities. This article presents two novel tactile play scenarios developed for robot-assisted play for children with autism. The play scenarios were developed against specific educational and therapeutic objectives that were discussed with teachers and therapists. These objectives were classified with reference to the ICF-CY, the International Classification of Functioning – version for Children and Youth. The article presents a detailed description of the play scenarios, and case study examples of their implementation in HRI studies with children with autism and the humanoid robot KASPAR.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Adaptive servo control for umbilical mating

Robotic applications at Kennedy Space Center are unique and in many cases require the fime positioning of heavy loads in dynamic environments. Performing such operations is beyond the capabilities of an off-the-shelf industrial robot. Therefore Robotics Applications Development Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center has put together an integrated system that coordinates state of the art robotic system providing an excellent easy to use testbed for NASA sensor integration experiments. This paper reviews the ways of improving the dynamic response of the robot operating under force feedback with varying dynamic internal perturbations in order to provide continuous stable operations under variable load conditions. The goal is to improve the stability of the system with force feedback using the adaptive control feature of existing system over a wide range of random motions. The effect of load variations on the dynamics and the transfer function (order or values of the parameters) of the system has been investigated, more accurate models of the system have been determined and analyzed

Self-Triggered Formation Control of Nonholonomic Robots

In this paper, we report the design of an aperiodic remote formation controller applied to nonholonomic robots tracking nonlinear, trajectories using an external positioning sensor network. Our main objective is to reduce wireless communication with external sensors and robots while guaranteeing formation stability. Unlike most previous work in the field of aperiodic control, we design a self-triggered controller that only updates the control signal according to the variation of a Lyapunov function, without taking the measurement error into account. The controller is responsible for scheduling measurement requests to the sensor network and for computing and sending control signals to the robots. We design two triggering mechanisms: centralized, taking into account the formation state and decentralized, considering the individual state of each unit. We present a statistical analysis of simulation results, showing that our control solution significantly reduces the need for communication in comparison with periodic implementations, while preserving the desired tracking performance. To validate the proposal, we also perform experimental tests with robots remotely controlled by a mini PC through an IEEE 802.11g wireless network, in which robots pose is detected by a set of camera sensors connected to the same wireless network

Evolving a rule system controller for automatic driving in a car racing competition

IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games. Perth, Australia, 15-18 December 2008.The techniques and the technologies supporting Automatic Vehicle Guidance are important issues. Automobile manufacturers view automatic driving as a very interesting product with motivating key features which allow improvement of the car safety, reduction in emission or fuel consumption or optimization of driver comfort during long journeys. Car racing is an active research field where new advances in aerodynamics, consumption and engine power are critical each season. Our proposal is to research how evolutionary computation techniques can help in this field. For this work we have designed an automatic controller that learns rules with a genetic algorithm. This paper is a report of the results obtained by this controller during the car racing competition held in Hong Kong during the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2008).Publicad

Diseño de un robot móvil autónomo de telepresencia

The recent rise in tele-operated autonomous mobile vehicles calls for a seamless control architecture that reduces the learning curve when the platform is functioning autonomously (without active supervisory control), as well as when tele-operated. Conventional robot plat-forms usually solve one of two problems. This work develops a mobile base using the Robot Operating System (ROS) middleware for teleoperation at low cost. The three-layer architec-ture introduced adds or removes operator complexity. The lowest layer provides mobility and robot awareness; the second layer provides usability; the upper layer provides inter-activity. A novel interactive control that combines operator intelligence/ skill with robot/autonomous intelligence enabling the mobile base to respond to expected events and ac-tively react to unexpected events is presented. The experiments conducted in the robot laboratory summarises the advantages of using such a system.El reciente auge de los vehículos móviles autónomos teleoperados exige una arquitectura de control sin fisuras que reduzca la curva de aprendizaje cuando la plataforma funciona de forma autónoma (sin control de supervisión activo), así como cuando es teleoperada. Las plataformas robóticas convencionales suelen resolver uno de los dos problemas. Este tra-bajo desarrolla una base móvil que utiliza el middleware Robot Operating System (ROS) para la teleoperación a bajo coste. La arquitectura de tres capas introducida añade o elimina la complejidad del operador. La capa más baja proporciona movilidad y conciencia robótica; la segunda capa proporciona usabilidad; la capa superior proporciona interactividad. Se presenta un novedoso control interactivo que combina la inteligencia/habilidades del op-erador con la inteligencia autónoma del robot, lo que permite que la base móvil responda a los eventos esperados y reaccione activamente a los eventos inesperados. Los experi-mentos realizados en el laboratorio robótica resumen las ventajas de utilizar un sistema de este tipoDepartamento de Ingeniería de Sistemas y AutomáticaMáster en Electrónica Industrial y Automátic