Reactive Planning for Assistive Robots

Reactive Motion Planning for Mobile Robots

Motion planning refers to the ability of a system to automatically plan its motions. It is considered central to the development of autonomous robots. In the last decade, much research effort was done on the application of probabilistic roadmaps methods (PRM) for different types of problems (Kavraki et al., 1996; Svestka & Overmars, 1997; Bohlin & Kavraki, 2000; Sánchez & Latombe, 2002). There ...

Controls for Assistive Robots

Turning Assistive Machines into Assistive Robots

For decades, the potential for automation—in particular, in the form of smart wheelchairs—to aid those with motor, or cognitive, impairments has been recognized. It is a paradox that often the more severe a person’s motor impairment, the more challenging it is for them to operate the very assistive machines which might enhance their quality of life. A primary aim of my lab is to address this co...

Sparse control for high-DOF assistive robots

Human control of high degree-of-freedom robotic systems can often be difficult due to a sparse control problem. This problem relates to the disparity in the amount of information required by the robot’s control variables and the relatively small volume of information a human can specify. To address the sparse control problem, we propose the use of subspaces embedded within the pose space of a r...

Efficient Natural Language Interfaces for Assistive Robots

Language is a powerful tool that enables humans and robots to interact without the need for complex graphical interfaces. Statistical techniques for interpreting the meaning of utterances in complex domestic environments, however, remain computationally intensive and are prone to error. Herein we present a model for language understanding that uses parse trees and environment models to infer bo...