Researchers say they have learned a lot from in-home test of adaptive robot interface
No one could blame Carnegie Mellon University students Akhil Padmanabha and Janavi Gupta if they were a bit anxious this past August as they traveled to the Bay Area home of Henry and Jane Evans.
The students were about to live with strangers for the next seven days. On top of that, Henry, a person with quadriplegia, would spend the week putting their Head-Worn Assistive Teleoperation (HAT) — an experimental interface to control a mobile robot – to the test. (See video below.)
HAT requires fewer fine motor skills than other interfaces to help people with some form of paralysis or similar motor impairments control a mobile robot and manipulator. It allows users to control a mobile robot via head motion and speech recognition, and versions of the device have featured a hands-free microphone and head-worn sensor. [Read more…] about Carnegie Mellon scientists demonstrate head-worn assistive device for robotics