Beyond Cybathlon: on-demand quadrupedal assistance for people with limited mobility

 What walking assistance does your competent? doctor have for you? Oh, nothing but a cane? 

How about something in here? And your doctor incompetently knows nothing about getting you 100% recovered walking!

• (Walking 50 posts to November 2020)

Beyond Cybathlon: on-demand quadrupedal assistance for people with limited mobility

• Carmen Scheidemann,
• Andrei Cramariuc,
• Changan Chen,
• Jia-Ruei Chiu &
• Marco Hutter 

We are providing an unedited version of this manuscript to give early access to its findings. Before final publication, the manuscript will undergo further editing. Please note there may be errors present which affect the content, and all legal disclaimers apply.

Abstract

Background

Assistance robots have the potential to increase the independence of people who require daily care due to limited mobility or being wheelchair-bound. Current solutions of attaching robotic arms to motorized wheelchairs offer limited additional mobility at the cost of increased size and reduced wheelchair maneuverability.

Methods

We present an on-demand quadrupedal assistance robot system controlled via a shared autonomy approach, which combines semi-autonomous task execution with human teleoperation. Due to the mobile nature of the system, it can assist the operator whenever needed and perform autonomous tasks independently, without otherwise restricting their mobility. We automate pick-and-place tasks, as well as robot movement through the environment with semantic, collision-aware navigation. For teleoperation, we present a mouth-level joystick interface that enables an operator with reduced mobility to control the robot’s end effector for precision manipulation.

Results

We showcase our system in the Cybathlon 2024 Assistance Robot Race, and validate it in an at-home experimental setup, where we measure task completion times and user satisfaction. We find our system capable of assisting in a broad variety of tasks, including those that require dexterous manipulation. The user study confirms the intuition that increased robot autonomy alleviates the operator’s mental load.

Conclusions

We present a flexible system that has the potential to help people in wheelchairs maintain independence in everyday life by enabling them to solve mobile manipulation problems without external support. We achieve results comparable to previous state-of-the-art on subjective metrics while allowing for more autonomy of the operator and greater agility for manipulation.