Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people

This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and users for which service robots are and are not suitable

Mechatronic Systems

Mechatronics, the synergistic blend of mechanics, electronics, and computer science, has evolved over the past twenty five years, leading to a novel stage of engineering design. By integrating the best design practices with the most advanced technologies, mechatronics aims at realizing high-quality products, guaranteeing at the same time a substantial reduction of time and costs of manufacturing. Mechatronic systems are manifold and range from machine components, motion generators, and power producing machines to more complex devices, such as robotic systems and transportation vehicles. With its twenty chapters, which collect contributions from many researchers worldwide, this book provides an excellent survey of recent work in the field of mechatronics with applications in various fields, like robotics, medical and assistive technology, human-machine interaction, unmanned vehicles, manufacturing, and education. We would like to thank all the authors who have invested a great deal of time to write such interesting chapters, which we are sure will be valuable to the readers. Chapters 1 to 6 deal with applications of mechatronics for the development of robotic systems. Medical and assistive technologies and human-machine interaction systems are the topic of chapters 7 to 13.Chapters 14 and 15 concern mechatronic systems for autonomous vehicles. Chapters 16-19 deal with mechatronics in manufacturing contexts. Chapter 20 concludes the book, describing a method for the installation of mechatronics education in schools

Towards Natural Human Control and Navigation of Autonomous Wheelchairs

Approximately 2.2 million people in the United States depend on a wheelchair to assist with their mobility. Often times, the wheelchair user can maneuver around using a conventional joystick. Visually impaired or wheelchair patients with restricted hand mobility, such as stroke, arthritis, limb injury, Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy or multiple sclerosis, prevent them from using traditional joystick controls. The resulting mobility limitations force these patients to rely on caretakers to perform everyday tasks. This minimizes the independence of the wheelchair user. Modern day speech recognition systems can be used to enhance user experiences when using electronic devices. By expanding the motorized wheelchair control interface to include the detection of user speech commands, the independence is given back to the mobility impaired. A speech recognition interface was developed for a smart wheelchair. By integrating navigation commands with a map of the wheelchair’s surroundings, the wheelchair interface is more natural and intuitive to use. Complex speech patterns are interpreted for users to command the smart wheelchair to navigate to specified locations within the map. Pocketsphinx, a speech toolkit, is used to interpret the vocal commands. A language model and dictionary were generated based on a set of possible commands and locations supplied to the speech recognition interface. The commands fall under the categories of speed, directional, or destination commands. Speed commands modify the relative speed of the wheelchair. Directional commands modify the relative direction of the wheelchair. Destination commands require a known location on a map to navigate to. The completion of the speech input processer and the connection between wheelchair components via the Robot Operating System make map navigation possible

A non-holonomic, highly human-in-the-loop compatible, assistive mobile robotic platform guidance navigation and control strategy

The provision of assistive mobile robotics for empowering and providing independence to the infirm, disabled and elderly in society has been the subject of much research. The issue of providing navigation and control assistance to users, enabling them to drive their powered wheelchairs effectively, can be complex and wide-ranging; some users fatigue quickly and can find that they are unable to operate the controls safely, others may have brain injury re-sulting in periodic hand tremors, quadriplegics may use a straw-like switch in their mouth to provide a digital control signal. Advances in autonomous robotics have led to the development of smart wheelchair systems which have attempted to address these issues; however the autonomous approach has, ac-cording to research, not been successful; users reporting that they want to be active drivers and not passengers. Recent methodologies have been to use collaborative or shared control which aims to predict or anticipate the need for the system to take over control when some pre-decided threshold has been met, yet these approaches still take away control from the us-er. This removal of human supervision and control by an autonomous system makes the re-sponsibility for accidents seriously problematic. This thesis introduces a new human-in-the-loop control structure with real-time assistive lev-els. One of these levels offers improved dynamic modelling and three of these levels offer unique and novel real-time solutions for: collision avoidance, localisation and waypoint iden-tification, and assistive trajectory generation. This architecture and these assistive functions always allow the user to remain fully in control of any motion of the powered wheelchair, shown in a series of experiments

Review of Machine Vision-Based Electronic Travel Aids

Visual impaired people have navigation and mobility problems on the road. Up to now, many approaches have been conducted to help them navigate around using different sensing techniques. This paper reviews several machine vision- based Electronic Travel Aids (ETAs) and compares them with those using other sensing techniques. The functionalities of machine vision-based ETAs are classified from low-level image processing such as detecting the road regions and obstacles to high-level functionalities such as recognizing the digital tags and texts. In addition, the characteristics of the ETA systems for blind people are particularly discussed

3D Perception Based Lifelong Navigation of Service Robots in Dynamic Environments

Lifelong navigation of mobile robots is to ability to reliably operate over extended periods of time in dynamically changing environments. Historically, computational capacity and sensor capability have been the constraining factors to the richness of the internal representation of the environment that a mobile robot could use for navigation tasks. With affordable contemporary sensing technology available that provides rich 3D information of the environment and increased computational power, we can increasingly make use of more semantic environmental information in navigation related tasks.A navigation system has many subsystems that must operate in real time competing for computation resources in such as the perception, localization, and path planning systems. The main thesis proposed in this work is that we can utilize 3D information from the environment in our systems to increase navigational robustness without making trade-offs in any of the real time subsystems. To support these claims, this dissertation presents robust, real world 3D perception based navigation systems in the domains of indoor doorway detection and traversal, sidewalk-level outdoor navigation in urban environments, and global localization in large scale indoor warehouse environments.The discussion of these systems includes methods of 3D point cloud based object detection to find respective objects of semantic interest for the given navigation tasks as well as the use of 3D information in the navigational systems for purposes such as localization and dynamic obstacle avoidance. Experimental results for each of these applications demonstrate the effectiveness of the techniques for robust long term autonomous operation