Kiri-Spoon: A Soft Shape-Changing Utensil for Robot-Assisted Feeding

TL;DR

This paper introduces Kiri-Spoon, a soft, shape-changing utensil for robot-assisted feeding that improves food handling robustness by dynamically adjusting its curvature to assist robots in grasping and delivering food.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel soft, kirigami-based utensil that can rapidly change shape, enhancing robot control and robustness in feeding tasks compared to traditional utensils.

Findings

Kiri-Spoon enables more secure food grasping by robots.

Shape-changing capability improves food delivery robustness.

Human studies show ease of use with the new utensil.

Abstract

Assistive robot arms have the potential to help disabled or elderly adults eat everyday meals without relying on a caregiver. To provide meaningful assistance, these robots must reach for food items, pick them up, and then carry them to the human's mouth. Current work equips robot arms with standard utensils (e.g., forks and spoons). But -- although these utensils are intuitive for humans -- they are not easy for robots to control. If the robot arm does not carefully and precisely orchestrate its motion, food items may fall out of a spoon or slide off of the fork. Accordingly, in this paper we design, model, and test Kiri-Spoon, a novel utensil specifically intended for robot-assisted feeding. Kiri-Spoon combines the familiar shape of traditional utensils with the capabilities of soft grippers. By actuating a kirigami structure the robot can rapidly adjust the curvature of Kiri-Spoon: at one extreme the utensil wraps around food items to make them easier for the robot to pick up and carry, and at the other extreme the utensil returns to a typical spoon shape so that human users can easily take a bite of food. Our studies with able-bodied human operators suggest that robot arms equipped with Kiri-Spoon carry foods more robustly than when leveraging traditional utensils. See videos here: https://youtu.be/nddAniZLFPk