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An Integrated Decision Making Approach for Adaptive Shared Control of Mobility Assistance Robots

Geravand, Milad; Werner, Christian; Hauer, Klaus; Peer, Angelika

An Integrated Decision Making Approach for Adaptive Shared Control of Mobility Assistance Robots Thumbnail


Authors

Milad Geravand

Christian Werner

Klaus Hauer

Angelika Peer



Abstract

© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. Mobility assistance robots provide support to elderly or patients during walking. The design of a safe and intuitive assistance behavior is one of the major challenges in this context. We present an integrated approach for the context-specific, on-line adaptation of the assistance level of a rollator-type mobility assistance robot by gain-scheduling of low-level robot control parameters. A human-inspired decision-making model, the drift-diffusion Model, is introduced as the key principle to gain-schedule parameters and with this to adapt the provided robot assistance in order to achieve a human-like assistive behavior. The mobility assistance robot is designed to provide (a) cognitive assistance to help the user following a desired path towards a predefined destination as well as (b) sensorial assistance to avoid collisions with obstacles while allowing for an intentional approach of them. Further, the robot observes the user long-term performance and fatigue to adapt the overall level of (c) physical assistance provided. For each type of assistance a decision-making problem is formulated that affects different low-level control parameters. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated in technical validation experiments. Moreover, the proposed approach is evaluated in a user study with 35 elderly persons. Obtained results indicate that the proposed gain-scheduling technique incorporating ideas of human decision-making models shows a general high potential for the application in adaptive shared control of mobility assistance robots.

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Apr 22, 2016
Online Publication Date Jun 3, 2016
Publication Date Nov 1, 2016
Deposit Date Jun 15, 2016
Publicly Available Date Jun 3, 2017
Journal International Journal of Social Robotics
Print ISSN 1875-4791
Electronic ISSN 1875-4805
Publisher Springer Verlag
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 8
Issue 5
Pages 631-648
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-016-0353-z
Keywords mobility assistance robot, adaptive shared control, decision making
Public URL https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/906741
Publisher URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12369-016-0353-z
Additional Information Additional Information : The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12369-016-0353-z
Contract Date Jun 15, 2016

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