A Robotic System For Improved Living By Severely Disabled Persons

Abstract

A combined effort between mechanical engineers at Rice University and rehabilitation engineers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston is aimed at developing hardware and software to make robotics assistance available to severely disabled persons [l]. Combined with a custom machine control interface, a 512K Macintosh computer allows a severely motor handicapped user to command a modified HERO 2000 mobile robot via interactive, mouse-activated graphics displays. This paper describes the hardware and software components of the system, and discusses the results of in-home testing of the system to date.