Event Location: Mauldin Auditorium (NSH 1305)

Abstract: For millions of people on a daily basis, motor impairments diminish quality of life, reduce independence, and increase healthcare costs. Assistive robots that autonomously manipulate objects within everyday settings offer the potential to improve the lives of the elderly, injured, and disabled by augmenting their abilities with those of a cooperative robot. Within this talk, I will give an overview of my lab’s research on autonomous mobile manipulation for people with motor impairments, which has resulted in EL-E, a prototype mobile manipulator capable of performing a variety of assistive manipulation tasks, such as object fetching, door opening, and drawer opening.

Three key questions drive this research: what tasks would be valuable for an assistive robot to perform; how can motor-impaired users direct a robot to perform these tasks; and how can a robot perform these tasks in unstructured environments, such as the home? To help answer these questions, we have taken inspiration from helper monkeys and service dogs. We have also integrated patient studies throughout the research process from initial design to systems-level evaluation through our collaboration with the ALS Center at the Emory School of Medicine. By taking a problem-driven, systems-level approach to our research, we have found synergistic answers to these questions that enable patients to work with robots in complementary ways that circumvent common stumbling blocks to deployable, real-world solutions.