Intention Reasoning Mistake Risk Considered Vacuuming Task Assistance Method via Omnidirectional Movement Assistive Robot

摘要

Even though the electric wheelchair can provide movement assistance for the elderly and lower-limb disabled people daily, we found that it's difficult for them to complete the operation of a wheelchair and the activity of daily living (ADL) tasks at the same time in their independent life. To provide more convenient movements assistance for them, we developed an Omnidirectional Movement Assistive Robot (OMAR). A user's intention recognition based movement assistance method was proposed in the previous study. By detecting user's upper body motion during the ADL task, OMAR can recognize user' intention and provide adequate movement for them autonomously. However, due to the randomness of upper body motion, in practice the mistake of user's task intention reasoning is inevitable. In this research, a safety guarantee framework was proposed to provide the emergency reaction of OMAR when user's intention was reasoned wrongly and dangerous movement occurred. By defining an explicit gesture for intention reasoning mistake risk signal, the user can propel OMAR to stop when they feel dangers and intent to stop OMAR at any time. The proposed method was applied in the vacuuming task assistance, and its effectiveness is validated experimentally.