11 accepted papers
Assistive devices are to be designed with the objective of use in daily-life as well as broad adoption by end users. In this context, it is necessary to tackle usability challenges by properly detecting and acting in accordance to user intents while minimizing the device installation complexity as w…
This paper presents a generic power wheelchair dynamic model. As a first contribution, this paper proposes to use a generic model composed of a geometric model and a lumped model in order to be compliant with a wide range of existing commercially available wheelchairs. In this model, a set of essent…
The evaluation of robot capabilities to navigate human crowds is essential to conceive new robots intended to operate in public spaces. This paper initiates the development of a benchmark tool to evaluate such capabilities; our long term vision is to provide the community with a simulation tool that…
In the case of non-holonomic robot navigation, path planning algorithms such as Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) rarely provide feasible and smooth paths without the need of additional processing. Furthermore, in a transport context like power wheelchair navigation, passenger comfort should be a…
Needle insertion procedures can greatly benefit from robotic systems to improve their accuracy and success rate. However, a fully automated system is usually not desirable and the clinicians need to be included in the control loop. In this paper we present a teleoperation framework for beveledtip fl…
Needle insertion procedures under ultrasound guidance are commonly used for diagnosis and therapy. It is often critical to accurately reach a targeted region, and this can be difficult to achieve due to intraoperative tissue motion. In this letter, we present a method to steer a beveled-tip flexible
An important aspect to be taken care of while designing assistive robots for mobility is that they need to operate among humans. Thus understanding human spatial social conventions and incorporating them in the assistive solutions, is important. In this paper, we introduce a semi-autonomous framewor…
Motor or visual impairments may prevent a user from steering a wheelchair effectively in indoor environments. In such cases, joystick jerks arising from uncontrolled motions may lead to collisions with obstacles. We here propose a perceptive shared control system that progressively corrects the traj…
Works on robotic needle steering often consider either tip-based control of flexible beveled tip needles or control of the bending of symmetric tip needles. In this paper a control law for needle steering which uses both direct manipulation of the needle base and the control of the tip deflection, i
With the increasing number of clinical interventions using needle shaped tools, robotic control of needle insertion procedures has been an active research field for many years. In this work we propose a 3D model of a flexible needle that takes into account tissue deformations in order to predict the…
In this work we introduce a low-level system that could be employed by a social robot like a robotic wheelchair or a humanoid, for approaching a group of interacting humans, in order to become a part of the interaction. Taking into account an interaction space that is created when at least two human…