Shared Control in Modal Teleoperation

Assistive devices, like powered wheelchairs and other mobility aids, have greatly enhanced the quality of life for individuals with disabilities. While assistive robotic arms increase the accessibility of physical manipulation tasks, they are difficult to teleoperate effectively. When controlling an arm with many degrees of freedom using a lower-dimensional input, even simple tasks can become tedious [1] and cognitively burdensome [2]. A common method for dealing with the mismatch in dimensionality is through modal control, in which the user selects one of several control modes, each corresponding to some mapping from input dimensions to a subset of the arm’s degrees of freedom. This incurs added complexities to predicting users’ intentions, but also introduces interesting opportunities for assistance. In this paper, we will describe how users typically employ assistive robotic arms under modal control, discuss the results of interviews with users to determine their opinions on this method of controlling the arm, propose some possible assistance techniques in this domain, and lay out our plan to test the effectiveness of each technique.