NRI: Adaptive Teleoperation Interfaces for In-Home Assistive Robots

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Mobile manipulators that can navigate and physically interact with their environment have the potential to assist people with motor limitations in carrying out activities of daily living independently. Despite this great potential, robots that can be safely deployed in the homes of these users do not yet exist. Until recently one of the key reasons for this gap was the lack of available hardware platforms, but the release of Stretch – a new low-cost, light-weight, inherently safe, and highly capable mobile manipulator – has greatly reduced the barrier to in-home deployments. A second key reason is the difficulty of robust autonomy given the vast variations across home environment. A practical, near-term solution is to have robots teleoperated by the user, which is also preferred by users in the target group who want to keep control over the robot. However, most existing teleoperations interfaces are not accessible to users with motor limitations who might have restricted input. This project aims to tackle this challenge by developing new systems and algorithms that enable adaptive accessible teleoperation interfaces for mobile manipulators. The ability to adapt to the unique requirements and preferences of these users while enabling the safest and most efficient operation of the robot is critical to our proposed solution. The project involves the development of an integrated system called AccessTeleopKit implanted on the Stretch robot platform, and shared as open-source software. New algorithms for automatically customizing interfaces in AccessTeleopKit based on user input ability assessment, and automating repetitive parts of common tasks from user demonstrations as they teleoperate the robot will be developed. Contributions also include conceptual frameworks to represent teleoperation interfaces as mappings between user inputs and robot control outputs with Finite State Machines; and the heuristically assessing the accessibility of a teleoperation interface for users with different abilities. Evaluation will involve user studies and multi-phase long-term deployments of the robots in five homes facilitated by occupational therapists and will contribute new empirical findings about the usability, utility, and acceptance of assistance robots in the home. New guidelines for occupational therapists to use teleoperated robots in their practice will also be created.