Empowering and assisting natural human mobility: The simbiosis walker

This paper presents the complete development of the Simbiosis Smart Walker. The device is equipped with a set of sensor subsystems to acquire user-machine interaction forces and the temporal evolution of user's feet during gait. The authors present an adaptive filtering technique used for the identification and separation of different components found on the human-machine interaction forces. This technique allowed isolating the components related with the navigational commands and developing a Fuzzy logic controller to guide the device. The Smart Walker was clinically validated at the Spinal Cord Injury Hospital of Toledo - Spain, presenting great acceptability by spinal chord injury patients and clinical staf

Design and evaluation of braced touch for touchscreen input stabilisation.

Incorporating touchscreen interaction into cockpit flight systems offers several potential advantages to aircraft manufacturers, airlines, and pilots. However, vibration and turbulence are challenges to reliable interaction. We examine the design space for braced touch interaction, which allows users to mechanically stabilise selections by bracing multiple fingers on the touchscreen before completing selection. Our goal is to enable fast and accurate target selection during high levels of vibration, without impeding interaction performance when vibration is absent. Three variant methods of braced touch are evaluated, using doubletap, dwell, or a force threshold in combination with heuristic selection criteria to discriminate intentional selection from concurrent braced contacts. We carried out an experiment to test the performance of these methods in both abstract selection tasks and more realistic flight tasks. The study results confirm that bracing improves performance during vibration, and show that doubletap was the best of the tested methods

RoboCon: A general purpose telerobotic control center

This report describes human factors issues involved in the design of RoboCon, a multi-purpose control center for use in US Department of Energy remote handling applications. RoboCon is intended to be a flexible, modular control center capable of supporting a wide variety of robotic devices

The TAO Project: Intelligent wheelchairs for the handicapped

Abstract An R&D project to build a series of intelligent autonomous wheelchairs is discussed. A standardized autonomy management system that can be installed on commercially available well-engineered power chairs has been developed and tested. A behavior-based approach was used to establish sufficient on-board autonomy at minimal cost and material usage, while achieving high efficiency, maximum safety, Iransparency in appearance, and extendability. So far, the add-on system has been installed and tried on two power wheelchair models. Initial results are highly encouraging. Introduction In recent years, with the concept of applying robots to service tasks [Gomi, 92] and with the accelerated rate of aging of the population being reported in many post-industrial countries, demand for more robotic assistive systems for people with physical ailments or loss of mental control is expected to increase. This is a seemingly major application area of service robots in the near future. For the past five years, we have been developing a range of autonomous mobile robots and their software using the behavior-based approach [Brooks, 86] [Gomi, 96a]. In Cartesian robotics, on which most conventional intelligent robotics approaches are based, planning for the generation of motion sequence and calculation of kinematics and dynamics for each planned motion occupy the center of both theoretical interest and practice. By adopting a behavior-based approach, I felt, wheelchairs which can operate daily in complex real-world environments with increased performance in efficiency, safety, and flexibility, and greatly reduced computational requirements can be built at less cost. In addition, improvements in the robustness and graceful degradation characteristics were expected. In the summer of 1995, an autonomy management system for a commercially available Canadian-made power wheelchair was successfully designed and implemented. The system looks after both longitudinal (forward and backward) and angular (left and right) movements of the chair as well limited vocal interactions with the user. The results were exhibited in August 1995 at the Intelligent Wheelchair Even

Auditory Self-Motion Simulation is Facilitated by Haptic and Vibrational Cues Suggesting the Possibility of Actual Motion

Sound fields rotating around stationary blindfolded listeners sometimes elicit auditory circular vection, the illusion that the listener is physically rotating. Experiment 1 investigated whether auditory circular vection depends on participants\u27 situational awareness of "movability", i.e., whether they sense/know that actual motion is possible or not. While previous studies often seated participants on movable chairs to suspend the disbelief of self-motion, it has never been investigated whether this does, in fact, facilitate auditory vection. To this end, 23 blindfolded participants were seated on a hammock chair with their feet either on solid ground ("movement impossible") or suspended ("movement possible") while listening to individualized binaural recordings of two sound sources rotating synchronously at 60 degrees. Although participants never physically moved, situational awareness of movability facilitated auditory vection. Moreover, adding slight vibrations like the ones resulting from actual chair rotation increased the frequency and intensity of vection. Experiment 2 extended these findings and showed that nonindividualized binaural recordings were as effective in inducing auditory circular vection as individualized recordings. These results have important implications both for our theoretical understanding of self-motion perception and for the applied field of self-motion simulations, where vibrations, non-individualized binaural sound, and the cognitive/perceptual framework of movability can typically be provided at minimal cost and effort

Hug2Go: The Development of Indoor Smart Driving Personal Mobility

Department of Creative Design EngineeringThis paper presents an initial study on the acceptance of indoor PMVs through providing design and development of a new PMVs (Personal Mobility Vehicles). Hug2Go is the indoor personal mobility, finding passenger through self-driving and going to place by a new way of steering. The personal mobility vehicles (PMVs) emerged as a new category of transportation device in the early 2000s. PMVs offers several potential benefits to consumers and society. Many researchers focused on performance or acceptability of use. However, most of PMVs regarded as outdoor mobility. Recently, popular PMVs has been moved to sharing service area. We thought it opportunity area for the mobility market. In this research, we suppose a new model of indoor mobility and examine it possible to build on the market through the usability test. First, we discovered the context of indoor mobility with existing PMVs driving. Through the observation, we found meaningful insights. Second, we designed and developed indoor PMVs. Third, we conducted a usability evaluation with fifteen participants by using Hug2Go. Experimental results with fifteen participants regarding the acceptance of indoor PMVs validated the proposed latent needs. Finally, we discussed findings and opportunities for improvements. The purpose of this study and the development of PMVs is to provide a comprehensive background for initial research of indoor PMVs.clos

Shared Control for Wheelchair Interfaces

Independent mobility is fundamental to the quality of life of people with impairment. Most people with severe mobility impairments, whether congenital, e.g., from cerebral palsy, or acquired, e.g., from spinal cord injury, are prescribed a wheelchair. A small yet significant number of people are unable to use a typical powered wheelchair controlled with a joystick. Instead, some of these people require alternative interfaces such as a head- array or Sip/Puff switch to drive their powered wheelchairs. However, these alternative interfaces do not work for everyone and often cause frustration, fatigue and collisions. This thesis develops a novel technique to help improve the usability of some of these alternative interfaces, in particular, the head-array and Sip/Puff switch. Control is shared between a powered wheelchair user, using an alternative interface and a pow- ered wheelchair fitted with sensors. This shared control then produces a resulting motion that is close to what the user desires to do but a motion that is also safe. A path planning algorithm on the wheelchair is implemented using techniques in mo- bile robotics. Afterwards, the output of the path planning algorithm and the user’s com- mand are both modelled as random variables. These random variables are then blended in a joint probability distribution where the final velocity to the wheelchair is the one that maximises the joint probability distribution. The performance of the probabilistic approach to blending the user’s inputs with the output of a path planner, is benchmarked against the most common form of shared control called linear blending. The benchmarking consists of several experiments with end users both in a simulated world and in the real-world. The thesis concludes that probabilistic shared control provides safer motion compared with the traditional shared control for difficult tasks and hard-to-use interfaces

The design and evaluation of an interface and control system for a scariculated rehabilitation robot arm

This thesis is concerned with the design and development of a prototype implementation of a Rehabilitation Robotic manipulator based on a novel kinematic configuration. The initial aim of the research was to identify appropriate design criteria for the design of a user interface and control system, and for the subsequent evaluation of the manipulator prototype. This led to a review of the field of rehabilitation robotics, focusing on user evaluations of existing systems. The review showed that the design objectives of individual projects were often contradictory, and that a requirement existed for a more general and complete set of design criteria. These were identified through an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of existing systems, including an assessment of manipulator performances, commercial success and user feedback. The resulting criteria were used for the design and development of a novel interface and control system for the Middlesex Manipulator - the novel scariculated robotic system. A highly modular architecture was adopted, allowing the manipulator to provide a level of adaptability not approached by existing rehabilitation robotic systems. This allowed the interface to be configured to match the controlling ability and input device selections of individual users. A range of input devices was employed, offering variation in communication mode and bandwidth. These included a commercial voice recognition system, and a novel gesture recognition device. The later was designed using electrolytic tilt sensors, the outputs of which were encoded by artificial neural networks. These allowed for control of the manipulator through head or hand gestures. An individual with spinal-cord injury undertook a single-subject user evaluation of the Middlesex Manipulator over a period of four months. The evaluation provided evidence for the value of adaptability presented by the user interface. It was also shown that the prototype did not currently confonn to all the design criteria, but allowed for the identification of areas for design improvements. This work led to a second research objective, concerned with the problem of configuring an adaptable user interface for a specific individual. A novel form of task analysis is presented within the thesis, that allows the relative usability of interface configurations to be predicted based upon individual user and input device characteristics. An experiment was undertaken with 6 subjects performing 72 tasks runs with 2 interface configurations controlled by user gestures. Task completion times fell within the range predicted, where the range was generated using confidence intervals (α = 0.05) on point estimates of user and device characteristics. This allowed successful prediction over all task runs of the relative task completion times of interface configurations for a given user

Degradation of learned skills. A review and annotated bibliography

An overview of the literature dealing with the retention of learned skills is presented. Basic effects of task type, training, retention interval, and recall variables are discussed, providing a background against which more recent literature dealing with operational spaceflights tasks is compared and assessed. Detailed and summary abstracts of research reports having particular relevance to the problem of spaceflight skill retention are provided

Multimodal virtual environments : MAGIC Toolkit and visual-haptic interaction paradigms

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 1996.Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-105).by I-Chun Alexandra Hou.M.S