Dusty: An Assistive Mobile Manipulator That Retrieves Dropped Objects for People With Motor Impairments
By King, Chih-Hung; Chen, Tiffany L.; Fan, Zhengqin; Glass, Jonathan D.; Kemp, Charles C.; Disability and Rehabilitation: Assistive Technology, Volume 7, Number 2, pages 168-179Publication Date: March 2012
Paper outlines the development of a teleoperated mobile manipulator that fetches objects from the floor and delivers them to users at a comfortable height. Named Dusty, the assistive device consists of a mobile robot with a joystick interface. The user controls the motion of the robot via the joystick and pushes buttons to command the robot to grasp and lift the object to be retrieved. The mobile robot comprises three main components: an iRobot Create which forms the base, an end effector, and a lift. Dusty demonstrated a success rate of 98.4 percent when autonomously grasping 25 objects considered important by people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The robot was tested with each object in 5 different configurations on 5 types of flooring. An experiment was subsequently conducted with 20 participants with ALS, who teleoperated Dusty to move around an obstacle, pick up and object, and deliver the object to themselves. Participants successfully completed these tasks in 59 out of 60 trials with a mean completion time of 61.4 seconds, and reported high overall satisfaction using Dusty, rating it an average 6.8 on a 7 point Likert scale. Participants considered Dusty to be significantly easier to use than their own hands or mechanical reachers, and more convenient than asking the help of family members in retrieving the object. Fourteen participants reported that they would prefer using Dusty over their current methods of object retrieval.
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Limited (Website:http://taylorandfrancis.org)
International Society of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine (Web Site: http://www.isprm.org )
Link to text: http://informahealthcare.com/doi/full/10.3109/17483107.2011.615374
