Abstract
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.
Highlights
A sufficient motor performance that allows performing physical daily activities is a critical requirement for maintaining mobility and vitality, especially for elderly people and patients
This section illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach, first by means of experiments aiming for a technical validation with a healthy user interacting with the platform and by means of a user study involving 35 elderly persons
A static map of the experimental room was build in the Robot Operating System (ROS) using the OPENSLAM Gmapping library package based on captured laser scanner, Inertia Measurement System (IMU) and robot’s odometry data
Summary
A sufficient motor performance that allows performing physical daily activities is a critical requirement for maintaining mobility and vitality, especially for elderly people and patients. Changes due to aging or disease may result in the limitation of human motor performance, sensing capabilities and cognitive functions, and reduce the ability to perform activities of daily living such as walking, transferring or performing personal hygiene. This again often leads to less autonomy and a decreased quality of life and selfesteem. A fully autonomous system that ignores the user’s intention can result in user dissatisfaction and dangerous situations in case of human and robot disagreement The latter can highly affect acceptability of such systems by their end-users (elderlies and patients) [1, 3, 12, 14, 20]. A shared control approach allowing human and robot to share the control over resulting actions is typically employed
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