Do You Need a Hand? -- a Bimanual Robotic Dressing Assistance Scheme

Abstract

Developing physically assistive robots capable of dressing assistance has the potential to significantly improve the lives of the elderly and disabled population. However, most robotics dressing strategies considered a single robot only, which greatly limited the performance of the dressing assistance. In fact, healthcare professionals perform the task bimanually. Inspired by them, we propose a bimanual cooperative scheme for robotic dressing assistance. In the scheme, an interactive robot joins hands with the human thus supporting/guiding the human in the dressing process, while the dressing robot performs the dressing task. We identify a key feature that affects the dressing action and propose an optimal strategy for the interactive robot using the feature. A dressing coordinate based on the posture of the arm is defined to better encode the dressing policy. We validate the interactive dressing scheme with extensive experiments and also an ablation study. The experiment video is available on https://sites.google.com/view/bimanualassitdressing/home

Robotic perception of object properties using tactile sensing

“…Deformable object manipulation has been a growing research area with various applications, such as assembling cables in factories [23]- [26], assisted dressing and laundry folding [27]- [30] and food production [31], [32]. These tasks mainly rely on visual perception [23], [28], [32]- [34].…”

Interactive Imitation Learning of Bimanual Movement Primitives

“…Among such tasks, picking large objects in unstructured environments (Fig. 1) [1], assisting the elderly [3], [4], surgery tasks [5], or complex assembly tasks [6] are shown to require dexterous bimanual setups. Factory assembly, logistics, and household applications of bimanual robots have been known for decades [7], [8].…”