Do You Need a Hand? -- a Bimanual Robotic Dressing Assistance Scheme

TL;DR

This paper introduces a bimanual robotic dressing assistance scheme inspired by healthcare professionals, involving an interactive robot guiding the human and a dressing robot performing the task, validated through extensive experiments.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel bimanual cooperative scheme for robotic dressing assistance, including an optimal strategy for the interactive robot and a new dressing coordinate based on arm posture.

Findings

The scheme effectively assists with dressing tasks in experiments.

The interactive robot improves dressing success rates.

The approach outperforms single-robot strategies.

Abstract

Developing physically assistive robots capable of dressing assistance has the potential to significantly improve the lives of the elderly and disabled population. However, most robotics dressing strategies considered a single robot only, which greatly limited the performance of the dressing assistance. In fact, healthcare professionals perform the task bimanually. Inspired by them, we propose a bimanual cooperative scheme for robotic dressing assistance. In the scheme, an interactive robot joins hands with the human thus supporting/guiding the human in the dressing process, while the dressing robot performs the dressing task. We identify a key feature that affects the dressing action and propose an optimal strategy for the interactive robot using the feature. A dressing coordinate based on the posture of the arm is defined to better encode the dressing policy. We validate the interactive dressing scheme with extensive experiments and also an ablation study. The experiment video is available on https://sites.google.com/view/bimanualassitdressing/home