Resumen de Augmenting user capabilities through an adaptive assistive manipulator
Assistive robot manipulators have the potential to increase the independence of disabled persons in activities of daily living. The current designs are mainly limited to pure teleoperation by the user, given the need for keeping the user in the control loop, and the complexity of the tasks and environments in which they operate. This thesis aims to augment the user’s capabilities for performing such tasks by adapting the robot, and its level of assistance, to the user. Methodologies for modeling and benchmarking the complete human-robot system were established, which helped drive the development of different approaches to adaptation. This included a task-oriented optimization of the robot physical structure, approaches for low-level adaptive shared control, and work on interactive learning of, and assistance on completing, simple object manipulation tasks. Three experimental platforms were used: The ASIBOT manipulator of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), the AMOR manipulator of Exact Dynamics, and the iCub humanoid robot.
