Multimodal User Supervised Interface and Intelligent Control (MUSIIC) for Assistive Robots

Abstract

This paper reports on a method and system which integrates human-computer interaction with reactive planning to operate a telerobot for use as an assistive device. The system is intended to meet the needs of individuals with physical disabilities and operate in an unstructured environment, rather than in a structured workcell. This allows the user considerable freedom and flexibility in terms of control and operating ease. We describe a novel approach for an intelligent assistive telerobotic system for such an environment: speech-deictic gesture control integrated with a knowledge-driven reactive planner and a stereo-vision system which builds a superquadric shape representation of the scene. 1.0 Introduction The rehabilitation robotics research literature describes many demonstrations of the use of robotic devices by individuals with disabilities [13, 17]. Unfortunately, many of the existing interface strategies, while important steps forward, have not met all of the desires of the ...