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 multimodal 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; and 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.
Highlights
B Y 2050, the world population is expected to increase by 2 to 4 billion people [1]
In three trials that were classified as failures, the participants successfully guided the robot during the shoe selection and delivery, but failed to firmly place their foot inside the shoe, which resulted in the shoe being dropped on the ground
This suggests that the task was relatively easy to perform regardless of the interaction modality used to perform the shoe selection, and whether the robot personalization was performed or not
Summary
B Y 2050, the world population is expected to increase by 2 to 4 billion people [1]. This growth will have a profound demographic consequence: while in 2000, 10% of the world’s population was over 60 years old, by 2050 this proportion will be more than doubled. Some studies report that more than half of the people 75 years or older who suffer from age-related physical and cognitive impairment need assistance. Manuscript received September 29, 2017; revised February 23, 2018; accepted March 14, 2018. Date of publication March 20, 2018; date of current version September 9, 2019. EPSRC under Project EP/N021703/1, and in part by the Spanish State Research Agency through the María de Maeztu Seal of Excellence to IRI under Project MDM-2016-0656. (Corresponding author: Aleksandar Jevtic.)
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