Shared Autonomy Systems for a Robot Personal Assistant
Monday, January 28, 2013 - 4:00pm - 4:50pm
KEC 1001
Bill Smart
Associate Professor
School of Mechanical, Industial, and Manufacturing Engineering
Oregon State University
Abstract:
Mobile manipulation robots offer the potential to vastly improve the quality of
live for persons with severe motor disabilities, by acting as surrogates though
which the person can influence and interact with their physical environment.
However, fully autonomous robots are not yet capable for performing this
service, and many tele-operation interfaces make implicit assumptions about the
users ability to manipulate input devices that cannot be met by persons with
severe
motor disabilities. We can address both of these problems with a shared autonomy
approach, allowing the human to task the robot at a high or low level, as the situation
dictates, and using autonomy to "fill in the gaps" in the user's control
In this talk, I will describe the Robots for Humanity project, a collaboration
between the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech, Willow Garage, and the
Personal Robotics Lab at Oregon State University. The goal of the project is to
design, implement, test, and field shared autonomy systems that will allow a
mute quadriplegic subject to use a sophisticated mobile manipulation robot as a
body surrogate. The robot performs a variety of tasks, from
fetching-and-carrying and personal maintenance, to stand-up comedy. I will
give an overview of the current state of the project, with a particular
emphasis on embedding context-sensitive interacting interfaces for the robot in
the world, allowing the subject to use and task the robot without traditional
mediating devices, such as a laptop computer and monitor-mounted eye-tracker.
Speaker Biography:
Bill Smart is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the School of Mechanical, Industial, and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University. Before moving to OSU he spent 12 years on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. He holds a PhD and MS in Computer Science from Brown University, and MSc in Intelligent Robotics from Edinburgh, and a BSc (hons) in Computer Science from Dundee University. His research interests cover the areas of human-robot interaction, mobile robotics, machine learning, and brain-computer interfaces.
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