Assistive robot hand for the disabled

Abstract

A robotic aid system for the disabled who need support for eating and drinking is proposed. A feature of this system is that the robotic aid system can communicate with the operator using speech recognition and speech synthesis functions. Another feature is that the robotic aid system has an image processing function. Using image processing the system can recognize the environmental situations of the dishes, cups and so on. Due to this image processing function, the operator does not need to specify the position and the posture of the dishes and target objects. Furthermore, the bilateral communication using speech and image processing enables a friendly man-machine interface, since speech and visual information is essential in human communication.