Adaptive Aid on Targeted Robot Manipulator Movements in Tele-Assistance

The teleoperation of robot manipulators over the internet suffers from variable delays in the communications. Here we address a tele-assistance scenario, where a remote operator assists a disabled or elderly user on daily life tasks. Our behavioral approach uses local environment information from robot sensing to help enable faster execution for a given movement tolerance. This is achieved through a controller that automatically slows the operator down before having collisions, using a set of distributed proximity sensors. The controller is made to gradually increase the assistance in situations similar to those where ollisions have occurred in the past, thus adapting to the given operator, robot and task-set. Two controlled virtual experiments for tele-assistance with a 5 DOF manipulator were performed, with 300 ms and 600 ms mean variable round-trip delays. The results showed significant improvements in the median times of 12.6% and 16.5%, respectively. Improvements in the subjective workload were also seen with the controller. A first implementation on a physical robot manipulator is described

Do different robot appearances change emotion recognition in children with ASD?

Socially Assistive Robotics has emerged as a potential tool for rehabilitating cognitive and developmental disorders in children with autism. Social robots found in the literature are often able to teach critical social skills, such as emotion recognition and physical interaction. Even though there are promising results in clinical studies, there is a lack of guidelines on selecting the appropriate robot and how to design and implement the child-robot interaction. This work aims to evaluate the impacts of a social robot designed with three different appearances according to the results of a participatory design (PD) process with the community. A validation study in the emotion recognition task was carried out with 21 children with autism. Spectrum disorder results showed that robot-like appearances reached a higher percentage of children's attention and that participants performed better when recognizing simple emotions, such as happiness and sadness. This study offers empirical support for continuing research on using SAR to promote social interaction with children with ASD. Further long-term research will help to identify the differences between high and low-functioning children. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2023 Pinto-Bernal, Sierra M., Munera, Casas, Villa-Moreno, Frizera-Neto, Stoelen, Belpaeme and Cifuentes.