Human-in-the-loop control of an assistive robotic arm in unstructured environments for spinal cord injured users

Abstract

We describe the progress in implementing a vision based robotic assist device to facilitate Activities of Daily Living (ADL) tasks for a class of users with motor disabilities. The goal of the research is to reduce time to task completion and cognitive burden for users interacting with an unstructured environment via a Wheelchair Mounted Robotic Arm (WMRA). A developed robot system is tested with five healthy subjects to assess its usefulness.