Adaptive collision-limitation behavior for an assistive manipulator

An approach for adaptive shared control of an assistive manipulator is presented. A set of distributed collision and proximity sensors is used to aid in limiting collisions during direct control by the disabled user. Artificial neural networks adapt the use of the proximity sensors online, which limits movements in the direction of an obstacle before a collision occurs. The system learns by associating the different proximity sensors to the collision sensors where collisions are detected. This enables the user and the robot to adapt simultaneously and in real-time, with the objective of converging on a usage of the proximity sensors that increases performance for a given user, robot implementation and task-set. The system was tested in a controlled setting with a simulated 5 DOF assistive manipulator and showed promising reductions in the mean time on simplified manipulation tasks. It extends earlier work by showing that the approach can be applied to full multi-link manipulators.