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Next: 9.3 Research Areas Up: 9 Future Work Previous: 9.1 Remote Tele-Assistance

9.2 External Prosthesis

An application similar to the remote tele-assistance, but requiring less hardware, is robotic manipulation aids for the handicapped. What we are proposing is a mobile manipulator to aid a wheelchair bound person with impaired manipulation abilities (for instance because of spinal chord injuries). In this case there is no reason to manipulate remotely. Instead the robot arm is attached to the same wheelchair the person is using. Since the person and the robot are acting in the same environment, there is no need for a complete immersion display, such as the VR helmet used in the remote tele-assistance scenario. The person controls the system by eye fixations tracked by a free head eye-tracker. By mounting one tracking camera on the eye-tracker, 2D gaze direction can be given directly in image space without external calibration. The robot arm is equipped as before, with stereo eye-in-hand cameras. Manipulations most commonly take place with respect to some surface (e.g. pick up from a table, turn a key in a door). The gaze direction is used to determine where on that surface the manipulation is to take place, and the two eye-in-hand cameras control depth to the surface.



Martin Jägersand