Assistance during eating is essential for those with severe mobility issues or eating risks. However, dependence on traditional human caregivers is linked to malnutrition, weight loss, and low self-esteem. For those who require eating assistance, a semi-autonomous robotic platform can provide independence and a healthier lifestyle. We demonstrate an essential capability of this platform: safe, comfortable, and effective transfer of a bite-sized food item from a utensil directly to the inside of a person's mouth. Our system uses a force-reactive controller to safely accommodate the user's motions throughout the transfer, allowing full reactivity until bite detection then reducing reactivity in the direction of exit. Additionally, we introduce a novel dexterous wrist-like end effector capable of small, unimposing movements to reduce user discomfort. We conduct a user study with 11 participants covering 8 diverse food categories to evaluate our system end-to-end, and we find that users strongly prefer our method to a wide range of baselines. Appendices and videos are available at our website: https://tinyurl.com/btICRA.
翻译:然而,对于需要食物援助的人来说,半自主机器人平台可以提供独立和更加健康的生活方式。我们展示了这个平台的基本能力:安全、舒适和有效地将咬伤大小的食物物品从一个胃道直接转移到一个人的嘴内。我们的系统使用强力反应控制器来安全地适应用户在整个转移过程中的动作,允许完全的回动,直到发现咬痕,然后减少退出方向的回动。此外,我们引入了一个新型的伸缩手腕式终端效果器,能够小而不动地减少用户的不满。我们与11名参与者进行了用户研究,涉及8个不同的食物类别,以评价我们的系统终端到终端,我们发现用户强烈倾向于我们的方法到广泛的基线。我们的网站有:https://tinyurl.com/btICR。</s>