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

这个学院早期职业发展计划（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价格合理的可穿戴机器人辅助，比如可能由颈脊髓损伤引起的。目标是帮助用户进行抓握动作，并使其能够完成日常生活任务。该项目侧重于三种援助方法。首先是利用机器人的高反应速度来预测和增强用户自身的抓取反射。二是通过让机器人根据用户偏好调整响应，提供自然舒适的协作抓取和保持。第三种是结合预期反射增强和自适应协同抓取，在现实可变性和不确定性条件下给予最大利益。这项工作解决了共享人机协作和辅助机制设计的基本问题。它促进残疾人的健康和福利，并提高他们独立行动的能力。对社会的其他好处是发展新的教育技术，扩大残疾人在教室和当地社区参与工程和科学的机会。对于有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、速度缓慢和沮丧。这个项目介绍了一种尚未开发的辅助抓取设备的模式，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，目标是改善共享任务性能和设备实施。该项目追求两个主要的功能结果：（R1）使用触觉传感器和机器人引导的反射来减少意外物体掉落的几率；（R2）通过机器人的支持来缓解身体运动，以提高在到达和抓取过程中的舒适度和技能。所使用的方法包括修改一种新型的共抓取试验台，以实现仅限人类和仅限机器人的控制案例，通过人体受试者实验来探索智能和体现的交织问题。具体的实验研究了在具有挑战性的抓取任务中，固有触觉反馈对物理人机交互和用户感知的作用。这个项目的顶点（R1+R2）是一个协作仲裁原型，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，以改进和个性化机器人系统与手的集成，以增强人类的独立性和幸福感。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.