Physically assistive robots present an opportunity to significantly increase the well-being and independence of individuals with motor impairments or other forms of disability who are unable to complete activities of daily living (ADLs). Speech ...

Physically assistive robots present an opportunity to significantly increase the well-being and independence of individuals with motor impairments or other forms of disability who are unable to complete activities of daily living. Speech interfaces, ...

With the ongoing efforts to empower people with mobility impairments and the increase in technological acceptance by the general public, assistive technologies, such as collaborative robotic arms, are gaining popularity. Yet, their widespread success is ...

Agents that assist people need to have well-initialized policies that can adapt quickly to align with their partners' reward functions. Initializing policies to maximize performance with unknown partners can be achieved by bootstrapping nonlinear models ...

In some contexts, like geriatric hospitals, the number of patients requiring assistance with feeding is very high and robots may be an effective tool for caregivers to provide better assistance. This article introduces NYAM, a robot designed to aid in ...

Hair-care robots have the potential to alleviate labor shortages in elderly care and enable those with limited mobility to express their identities through hair styling. In this work, we highlight two advantages that soft robotic manipulators have in ...

Robotic arms, integral in domestic care for individuals with motor impairments, enable them to perform Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) independently, reducing dependence on human caregivers. These collaborative robots require users to manage multiple ...

As the need for accessible upper-body stroke rehabilitation grows, it becomes increasingly important to investigate how the difficulty level of rehabilitation tasks can be personalized to a patient and automatically adapted based on the patient's ...

This study investigates the impact of dynamic matching of robot motion velocity to users' walking velocity in a human-robot approach scenario on three categories: perceived comfort, interactivity, and naturalness. Considering age diversity, participants ...

While Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems excel in controlled environments, challenges arise in robot-specific setups due to unique microphone requirements and added noise sources. In this paper, we create a dataset of initiating conversations ...

Teleoperation of mobile manipulators within a home environment can significantly enhance the independence of individuals with severe motor impairments, allowing them to regain the ability to perform self-care and household tasks. There is a critical need ...

Shared control approaches to robot assistance, which predict a user's goal based on their control input and provide autonomous assistance towards the predicted goal, typically assume that user behavior remains the same despite the presence of the ...

How and what health and care professionals do will be changed by the use of robotics technologies in their workplaces. This paper reports provisional results of a 12-month scoping project in which we explained to people working in care sectors what ...

The ability to perform common day-to-day tasks is essential for an independent lifestyle. However, many crucial tasks are unaddressed for blind or visually impaired (BVI) people with the current solutions. Our research goal aims to provide technical ...

The ability to shop independently, especially in grocery stores, is important for maintaining a high quality of life. This can be particularly challenging for people with visual impairments (PVI). Stores carry thousands of products, with approximately 30,...

This paper presents the efforts made towards the creation of a client interface to be used with Hello-Robot Stretch. The goal is to create an interface that is accessible to allow for the best user experience. This interface enables users to control ...

Many assistive home robotics applications assume open-loop interactions: robots incorporate little feedback from people while autonomously completing tasks. This places undue burden on people to condition their actions and environment to maximize the ...

Assistive robots can empower those with mobility impairments, but they must manage the trade-off between safety, efficacy, and comfort. For some task dimensions, there is flexibility: humans can shake robot hands anywhere within reach. For others, ...

In imagining a future where climate change forces more intimate relationships between humans and nature, social robots can be introduced to revolutionize the way humans understand and communicate with plants. Through the Double Diamond design method with ...

We present the Human And Robot Multimodal Observations of Natural Interactive Collaboration (HARMONIC) dataset. This is a large multimodal dataset of human interactions with a robotic arm in a shared autonomy setting designed to imitate assistive eating. ...