An Adaptable, Safe, and Portable Robot-Assisted Feeding System

2024/03/07 by Ethan Kroll Gordon, Gordon, Ethan Kroll, Rajat Kumar Jenamani +27 · 2 citations
Engineering · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #IoT-based Smart Home Systems #Robotics (cs.RO)

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2403.04134

openalex publication_date 2024/03/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We demonstrate a robot-assisted feeding system that enables people with mobility impairments to feed themselves. Our system design embodies Safety, Portability, and User Control, with comprehensive full-stack safety checks, the ability to be mounted on and powered by any powered wheelchair, and a custom web-app allowing care-recipients to leverage their own assistive devices for robot control. For bite acquisition, we leverage multi-modal online learning to tractably adapt to unseen food types. For bite transfer, we leverage real-time mouth perception and interaction-aware control. Co-designed with community researchers, our system has been validated through multiple end-user studies.

Cited by

• OpenRoboCare: A Multimodal Multi-Task Expert Demonstration Dataset for Robot Caregiving
• WAFFLE: A Wearable Approach to Bite Timing Estimation in Robot-Assisted Feeding

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