Adaptive collision-limitation behavior for an assistive manipulator

Abstract

An approach for adaptive shared control of an assistive manipulator is presented. A set of distributed collision and proximity sensors is used to aid in limiting collisions during direct control by the disabled user. Artificial neural networks adapt the use of the proximity sensors online, which limits movements in the direction of an obstacle before a collision occurs. The system learns by associating the different proximity sensors to the collision sensors where collisions are detected. This enables the user and the robot to adapt simultaneously and in real-time, with the objective of converging on a usage of the proximity sensors that increases performance for a given user, robot implementation and task-set. The system was tested in a controlled setting with a simulated 5 DOF assistive manipulator and showed promising reductions in the mean time on simplified manipulation tasks. It extends earlier work by showing that the approach can be applied to full multi-link manipulators.

Adaptive Aid on Targeted Robot Manipulator Movements in Tele-Assistance

“…The results should be seen in relation with the previous studies that applied a similar approach to direct control by users with simulated disabilities [5,6]. If the benefits are confirmed with real end-users the same physical system could one day assist both on direct control by the user and on tele-assistance by a remote operator on more difficult tasks.…”

“…In the above example, once the robot no longer collides with the obstacles, it will stop learning new connections. See also previous work by the current authors on adaptive proximitybased collision-limitation for disabled users controlling assistive manipulators directly [5,6]. The work presented in the current paper extends this approach to teleoperation with time-varying delays.…”

“…Second, a component that provided feedback during aid, dented as ⃗ Fprox. More details on the calculation of the latter can be found in Equation (6) in Section 3.3.…”

“…However, the task execution times can be very high [2], and so can the mental and physical demand. Research is currently underway to explore what assistance can be provided to the user to help amend these issues [3][4][5][6]. Shared autonomy on mobile manipulators is also being explored [7].…”

Distributed and Adaptive Shared Control Systems: Methodology for the Replication of Experiments

“…• applies information metrics to the results in [5] • applies predictive information (PI) for the first time to [4] • an open repository for sharing experimental papers with human-robot systems has been set up at http://throughput. sourceforge.net.…”