CAREER: Not all Collisions are Bad: Leveraging Physical Interactions towards User-Empowered Robotic Caregiving

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Building safe, efficient, and meaningful robotic individual assistance for long-term caregiving is a grand challenge of robotics. More than a quarter of people living in the United States in 2014 had a disability, and 24.2 million people aged 18 or older required assistance with activities of daily living such as feeding, bathing, transferring, dressing, toileting, and ambulating. Caregiving robots have the potential to help increase or prolong user independence while reducing caregiver burden. However, there are hardly any caregiving robots that provide long-term care for performing activities of daily living, currently. One of the primary reasons is the fundamental limitation to which robots can reason about physical contact which is essential to perform these activities. Therefore, our key insight is to leverage this physical contact instead of avoiding them and to learn safe and efficient physical interactions while empowering the users. This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project focuses on learning robot control policies that leverage physical contact during the activities of robot-assisted feeding and bed-bathing while empowering the users themselves with decision-making capabilities for assisting care recipients with Spinal Cord Injury.The goal of this project is to develop fundamental capabilities towards reshaping the field of robotic physical caregiving by designing control policies that leverage varied multimodal physical interactions to perform activities of daily living (ADL) safely and efficiently. This also entails addressing perception and action uncertainty in unstructured environments by empowering the users to make critical decisions without completely relying on full but fragile autonomy. The fields of assistive robotics and physical human-robot interaction have primarily focused on deliberate contact at the end-effector using carefully controlled actions that are optimized for sensing. This does not capture the realistic scenarios of physical caregiving that may require reasoning about incidental and/or distributed contacts. This project aims to cover this gap and takes the first steps towards translating laboratory research in robotic physical caregiving to real-world deployment. The research plan is organized into three thrusts where the first thrust focuses on designing autonomous control policies that use multimodal sensory inputs for safe and efficient robotic physical caregiving. The second thrust brings users in the loop to augment autonomous control policies and empowers the users by including them in the critical decision-making process. Finally, the third thrust focuses on designing control policies for robotic caregiving that can adapt to a user's changing cognitive workload. This project focuses on the activities of robot-assisted feeding and bed-bathing and aims to evaluate these methods with individuals with C1-C4 Spinal Cord Injury in their real homes towards long-term assistance.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.