Personalized robot assistant for support in dressing

Jevtic, Aleksandar; Valle, Andres Flores; Alenya, Guillem; Chance, Greg; Caleb-Solly, Praminda; Dogramadzi, Sanja; Torras, Carme

Abstract

Robot-assisted dressing is performed in close physical interaction with users who may have a wide range of physical characteristics and abilities. Design of user adaptive and personalized robots in this context is still indicating limited, or no consideration, of specific user-related issues. This paper describes the development of a multi-modal robotic system for a specific dressing scenario - putting on a shoe, where users’ personalized inputs contribute to a much improved task success rate. We have developed: 1) user tracking, gesture recognition andposturerecognitionalgorithmsrelyingonimagesprovidedby a depth camera; 2) a shoe recognition algorithm from RGB and depthimages;3)speechrecognitionandtext-to-speechalgorithms implemented to allow verbal interaction between the robot and user. The interaction is further enhanced by calibrated recognition of the users’ pointing gestures and adjusted robot’s shoe delivery position. A series of shoe fitting experiments have been performed on two groups of users, with and without previous robot personalization, to assess how it affects the interaction performance. Our results show that the shoe fitting task with the personalized robot is completed in shorter time, with a smaller number of user commands and reduced workload.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 14, 2018
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2018
• Deposit Date: Mar 22, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 22, 2018
• Journal: IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems
• Print ISSN: 2379-8920
• Electronic ISSN: 2379-8939
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TCDS.2018.2817283
• Keywords: assistive robots, robot personalization, multimodal human-robot interaction
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/874685
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TCDS.2018.2817283
• Additional Information: Additional Information : (c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.
• Contract Date: Mar 22, 2018