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

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

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