Teleoperated assistive robots with compliant arms may be well-suited to tasks that require contact with people and operation within human environments. However, little is known about the effects of force feedback and ...

Assistive mobile robots that autonomously manipulate objects within everyday settings have the potential to improve the lives of the elderly, injured, and disabled. Within this paper, we present the most recent version of ...

This paper describes the design and implementation of a behavior that allows a robot with a compliant arm to perform wiping motions that are involved in bed baths. A laser-based operator-selection interface enables an ...

Many tasks that would be of benefit to users in domestic environments require that robots manipulate articulated objects such as doors and drawers. In this paper, we present a novel approach that simultaneously estimates ...

When a user is in close proximity to a robot, physical contact becomes a potentially valuable channel for communication. People often use direct physical contact to guide a person to a desired location (e.g., leading a ...

Instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) involve physical interactions with diverse mechanical systems found within human environments. In this paper, we describe our efforts to capture the everyday mechanics of ...

Previously, we have presented an implementation of impedance control inspired by the Equilibrium Point Hypothesis that we refer to as equilibrium point control (EPC). We have demonstrated that EPC can enable a robot in a ...

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 ...

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 ...

Retrieval of dropped objects has consistently been ranked as a high priority task for assistive robots. We have previously presented a dustpan-inspired end effector capable of robustly grasping objects from the floor. In ...