Feedbot - A robotic arm for autonomous assisted feeding

Abstract

The act of assisted feeding is a challenging task that requires a good reactive planning strategy to cope with an unpredictable environment. It can be seen as a tracking task, where some end effector must travel to a moving goal. This work builds upon state of the art algorithms, such as Discriminative Optimization, making use of a Kinect camera and a modular robotic arm to implement a closed form system that performs assisted feeding. It presents two different approaches: the use of a variable rate function for updating the trajectory with information on the moving goal, and the definition of different risk regions that will shape a safer trajectory.