Publication

Personalized robot assistant for support in dressing

Journal Article (2019)

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems

Pages

363-374

Volume

11

Number

3

Doc link

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TCDS.2018.2817283

File

Download the digital copy of the doc pdf document

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 and posture recognition algorithms relying on images provided by a depth camera; 2) a shoe recognition algorithm from RGB and depth images; 3) speech recognition and text-to-speech algorithms 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.

Categories

manipulators.

Author keywords

Human-Robot Interaction, Assistive Robots

Scientific reference

A. Jevtić, A. Flores, G. Alenyà, G. Chance, P. Caleb-Solly, S. Dogramadzi and C. Torras. Personalized robot assistant for support in dressing. IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, 11(3): 363-374, 2019.