Development of Meal Assistance Robot for Disabled Persons

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Disabled persons who have troubles in motion of their upper limbs due to their muscles diseases and/or accidents of their nervous system are hard to manage their daily life by themselves. A meal assistance robot is developed for elderly and/or disabled persons who have partly or completely lost the ability of moving their upper limbs by themselves independently. The meal assistance robot supports the disabled persons and brings foods from dishes to their mouth by their own forearms.Target position of a meal assistance robot is determined by using electrooculogram (EOG) signals and dish image. Scooping points on dishes can be determined by using image processing of the dish image taken by a video camera Human intention, i.e., selection of dish, can be extracted from electrooculogram (EOG) signals which are measured by electrodes on the face. The dishes can be selected only by gazing the dish which the subject wants to eat. Target position of the meal assistance robot, i.e., the scooping point of the selected dish can be determined by the combination of the scooping point determination and the dish selection.Position control is adopted for control strategy of the meal assistance robot, and force free control which can realize flexible motion of the meal assistance robot is adopted in order to avoid the meal assistance robot injure the subject.The effectiveness of the developed meal assistance robot is assured by experimental works on normal persons.