Philippe HOPPENOT, Etienne COLLE

Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems

Abstract: Disabled people assistance is developing thanks to progress of new technologies. A manipulator arm mounted on a mobile robot can assist the disabled person for the partial restoration of the manipulative function. User pilots the robot via a control station using enhanced reality techniques. To be affordable such a system must be cost effective. That constraint limits perception means: ultrasonic ring, dead reckoning and low cost camera. The development of the project has followed two stages. The first one consists of giving maximum autonomy capacities to the robot for planning, navigation and localisation. The second stage is the study of the Man-Machine Co-operation (MMC) for the command of the robot system. Indeed, the aim is to perform a mission (mobile robot displacement) using robot capacities and man possibilities. Users build their own strategies to carry out successively a mission. Strategy can be seen as a succession of control modes, which can be manual, automatic or shared. In the latter case the control of the robot is shared between human operator and machine. The main problem is then task allocation between both intelligent entities. Each one has planification, navigation and localisation abilities. The paper presents our approach for planning and navigation and develops a more specific study about robot localisation.

Key words: Disabled people assistance, man-machine co-operation strategy, control modes, task allocation, mobile robotics.