title: Assistive Robotic Manipulation through Shared Autonomy and a Body-Machine Interface.
abstract: Assistive robotic manipulators have the potential to improve the lives of people with motor impairments. They can enable individuals to perform activities such as pick-and-place tasks, opening doors, pushing buttons, and can even provide assistance in personal hygiene and feeding. However, robotic arms often have more degrees of freedom (DoF) than the dimensionality of their control interface, making them challenging to use-especially for those with impaired motor abilities. Our research focuses on enabling the control of high-DoF manipulators to motor-impaired individuals for performing daily tasks. We make use of an individual's residual motion capabilities, captured through a Body-Machine Interface (BMI), to generate control signals for the robotic arm. These low-dimensional controls are then utilized in a shared-control framework that shares control between the human user and robot autonomy. We evaluated the system by conducting a user study in which 6 participants performed 144 trials of a manipulation task using the BMI interface and the proposed shared-control framework. The 100% success rate on task performance demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed system for individuals with motor impairments to control assistive robotic manipulators.
authors: Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA.
authors: Siddarth
authors: S
authors: Jain
authors: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA.
authors: Ali
authors: A
authors: Farshchiansadegh
authors: Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA.
authors: Alexander
authors: A
authors: Broad
authors: Department of Physiology, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA.
authors: Farnaz
authors: F
authors: Abdollahi
authors: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA; Department of Physiology, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA; Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA.
authors: Ferdinando
authors: F
authors: Mussa-Ivaldi
authors: Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA; Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA.
authors: Brenna
authors: B
authors: Argall