We (the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech) have developed an additional module for an Invacare fully electric hospital bed (Model 5410IVC) so that the bed can be controlled from a web-based interface. This module ...

Assistive mobile manipulators have the potential to one day serve as surrogates and helpers for people with disabilities, giving them the freedom to perform tasks such as scratching an itch, picking up a cup, or socializing ...

Based on a lifetime of experience, people anticipate the forces associated with performing a manipulation task. In contrast, most robots lack common sense about the forces involved in everyday manipulation tasks. In this ...

Physical human-robot interaction has the potential to be useful in a number of domains, but this will depend on how people respond to the robot’s actions. For some domains, such as healthcare, a robot is likely to initiate ...

Visual features can help predict if a manipulation behavior will succeed at a given location. For example, the success of a behavior that flips light switches depends on the location of the switch. We present methods that ...

Clutter creates challenges for robot manipulation, including a lack of non-contact trajectories and reduced visibility for line-of-sight sensors. We demonstrate that robots can use whole-arm tactile sensing to perceive ...

Passive UHF RFID tags are well matched to robots' needs. Unlike lowfrequency (LF) and high-frequency (HF) RFID tags, passive UHF RFID tags are readable from across a room, enabling a mobile robot to efficiently discover ...

Delivering an object to a user would be a generally useful capability for service robots. Within this paper, we look at this capability in the context of assistive object retrieval for motor-impaired users. We first describe ...

Handheld manipulable objects can often be found on flat surfaces within human environments. Researchers have previously demonstrated that perceptually segmenting a flat surface from the objects resting on it can enable ...

In this paper, we demonstrate data-driven inference of mechanical properties of objects using a tactile sensor array (skin) covering a robot's forearm. We focus on the mobility (sliding vs. fixed), compliance (soft vs. ...