(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2016-05)
Park, Daehyung; Kim, You Keun; Erickson, Zackory; Kemp, Charles C.
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.