Object Affordance-Based Implicit Interaction for Wheelchair-Mounted Robotic Arm Using a Laser Pointer

Abstract

With the growth of the world’s population, limited healthcare resources cannot provide adequate nursing services for all people in need. The wheelchair-mounted robotic arm (WMRA) with interactive technology could help to improve users’ self-care ability and relieve nursing stress. However, the users struggle to control the WMRA due to complex operations. To use the WMRA with less burden, this paper proposes an object affordance-based implicit interaction technology using a laser pointer. Firstly, a laser semantic identification algorithm combined with the YOLOv4 and the support vector machine (SVM) is designed to identify laser semantics. Then, an implicit action intention reasoning algorithm, based on the concept of object affordance, is explored to infer users’ intentions and learn their preferences. For the purpose of performing the actions about task intention in the scene, the dynamic movement primitives (DMP) and the finite state mechanism (FSM) are respectively used to generalize the trajectories of actions and reorder the sequence of actions in the template library. In the end, we verified the feasibility of the proposed technology on a WMRA platform. Compared with the previous method, the proposed technology can output the desired intention faster and significantly reduce the user’s limb involvement time (about 85%) in operating the WMRA under the same task.

Optimization of Wheelchair-Mounted Robotic Arms’ Base Placement by Fusing Occupied Grid Map and Inverse Reachability Map

“…In previous work, we used the beta process autoregressive hidden Markov model to pour water from the bottle to the cup [11], and a laser pointer was used to facilitate the interactions between humans and a WMRA in an indoor environment [12]. We focused on programming by the demonstration approach to improving the intelligence and adaptability of the WMRA [13] and proposed an object-affordance-based implicit interaction technology using a laser pointer [14]. The WMRA with laser interaction was designed to identify the desired intention faster and perform tasks with less limb involvement from the user, as shown in Figure 1.…”