CAREER: Robotic Augmentation of Human Reflexes and Reach through Collaborative Grasping

职业：通过协作抓取机器人增强人类反应和触及范围

• 批准号: 2237843
• 负责人: Hannah Stuart
• 金额: $ 60万
• 依托单位: University of California-Berkeley
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-06-01 至 2028-05-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2237843&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Robotic; Augmentation; Human; Reflexes

This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) project will create a new generation of effective and affordable wearable robotic assistance for people with severe weakness or partial paralysis of the hands and arms, such as might arise from cervical spinal cord injury. The objective is to help the user with grasping and holding actions, and enable performance of tasks of daily living. The project focuses on three assistance methods. The first is to use the high reaction speed of the robot to anticipate and augment the user's own grasp reflexes. The second is to provide natural and comfortable collaborative grasping and holding, by having the robot adapt its response to user preference. The third combines both anticipatory reflex augmentation and adaptive collaborative grasping to bestow maximal benefits under conditions of realistic variability and uncertainty. This work addresses fundamental issues of shared human-robot collaboration and the design of assistive mechanisms. It advances the health and welfare of people with disabilities, and increases their ability to function independently. Other benefits to society are the development of new educational techniques to broaden participation of people with disabilities in engineering and science, both in the classroom and in the local community.For people with disabilities capable of partial body-power, miscoordination with a robotic exoskeleton can lead to inefficiency, slowness, and frustration. This project introduces an unexplored modality for assistive grasping devices called collaborative grasping, or co-grasping, which is suitable to augment people with partial body power. This approach fundamentally alters the role of robotic elements with the goal of improving shared task performance and device embodiment. The project pursues two primary functional outcomes: (R1) reducing the rate of accidental object drops using tactile sensors and robot-led reflexes and (R2) easing body movements with robotic support to improve comfort and skill during reach-and-grasp. The methods used include the modification of a novel co-grasping testbed to also enable human-only and robot-only control cases, to probe interwoven questions of intelligence and embodiment through human subjects experiments. Specific experiments investigate the role of inherent haptic feedback on physical human robot interaction and user perception during challenging grasping tasks. The capstone of this project (R1+R2) is a collaborative arbitration prototype to accomplish (R1) and (R2) concurrently, including during realistic tasks of daily living. Overall, this work generates new tools and knowledge to improve and personalize the integration of robotic systems with the hands to enhance human independence and wellbeing.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

这个教师早期职业发展计划（CAREER）项目将为手部和手臂严重虚弱或部分瘫痪的人创造新一代有效且负担得起的可穿戴机器人辅助，例如可能因颈脊髓损伤而引起的。其目的是帮助用户进行抓握和保持动作，并能够执行日常生活任务。该项目侧重于三种援助方法。第一种是利用机器人的高反应速度来预测和增强用户自己的抓握反射。第二个是通过让机器人根据用户偏好调整其响应，提供自然而舒适的协作抓取和保持。第三种结合了预期反射增强和自适应协作抓取，以在现实可变性和不确定性的条件下获得最大利益。这项工作解决了共享的人机协作和辅助机制的设计的基本问题。它促进残疾人的健康和福利，并提高他们独立运作的能力。对社会的其他好处是开发新的教育技术，以扩大残疾人在工程和科学方面的参与，无论是在课堂上还是在当地社区。对于能够部分身体力量的残疾人来说，与机器人外骨骼的不协调可能导致效率低下，缓慢和沮丧。这个项目介绍了一种未开发的辅助抓取设备，称为协作抓取或共同抓取，它适合于增强部分身体力量的人。这种方法从根本上改变了机器人元件的作用，目的是提高共享任务的性能和设备的具体化。该项目追求两个主要功能成果：（R1）使用触觉传感器和机器人引导的反射来降低意外物体掉落的比率，以及（R2）通过机器人支持来缓解身体运动，以提高达到和抓取过程中的舒适度和技能。所使用的方法包括修改一个新的共同抓测试平台，也使人类和机器人的控制情况下，通过人类受试者的实验，探索交织的智能和体现的问题。具体的实验研究的作用，固有的触觉反馈的物理人类机器人的互动和用户感知在具有挑战性的抓取任务。这个项目（R1+R2）的顶点是一个协同仲裁原型，可以同时完成（R1）和（R2），包括在日常生活的现实任务中。总的来说，这项工作产生了新的工具和知识，以改善和个性化机器人系统与手的集成，以提高人类的独立性和福祉。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。