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Adapt or Perish? Exploring the Effectiveness of Adaptive DoF Control Interaction Methods for Assistive Robot Arms

  • Robot arms are one of many assistive technologies used by people with motor impairments. Assistive robot arms can allow people to perform activities of daily living (ADL) involving grasping and manipulating objects in their environment without the assistance of caregivers. Suitable input devices (e.g., joysticks) mostly have two Degrees of Freedom (DoF), while most assistive robot arms have six or more. This results in time-consuming and cognitively demanding mode switches to change the mapping of DoFs to control the robot. One option to decrease the difficulty of controlling a high-DoF assistive robot arm using a low-DoF input device is to assign different combinations of movement-DoFs to the device’s input DoFs depending on the current situation (adaptive control). To explore this method of control, we designed two adaptive control methods for a realistic virtual 3D environment. We evaluated our methods against a commonly used non-adaptive control method that requires the user to switch controls manually. This was conducted in a simulated remote study that used Virtual Reality and involved 39 non-disabled participants. Our results show that the number of mode switches necessary to complete a simple pick-and-place task decreases significantl when using an adaptive control type. In contrast, the task completion time and workload stay the same. A thematic analysis of qualitative feedback of our participants suggests that a longer period of training could further improve the performance of adaptive control methods.

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Metadaten
Author:Kirill Kronhardt, Stephan Rübner, Max Pascher, Felix Ferdinand Goldau, Udo Frese, Jens Gerken
DOI:https://doi.org/10.3390/technologies10010030
Parent Title (English):Technologies
Publisher:MDPI
Place of publication:Basel
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2022/02/17
Year of first Publication:2022
Publishing Institution:Westfälische Hochschule Gelsenkirchen Bocholt Recklinghausen
Release Date:2022/02/17
Tag:assistive robotics; augmented reality; human robot interaction; shared user control; visual cues
GND Keyword:Erweiterte Realität <Informatik>
Volume:10.2022
Issue:1
Pagenumber:23
First Page:Artikelnr. 30
Departments / faculties:Fachbereiche / Informatik und Kommunikation
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - Namensnennung

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