Vision-Based Robot Arm Control Interface for Retrieving Objects from the Floor

Approximately half of the patients with spinal cord in-juries in Japan have a cervical spinal cord injury. Ow-ing to the trunk dysfunction, patients with high-level spinal cord injuries have particular difficulty when searching for or picking up objects from the floor. Re-cently, welfare robot arms have been developed to help such individuals increase self-reliance. In this study, we propose an operating system that includes an eye -in-hand system with a touchscreen interface for grasp-ing objects from the floor and delivering them to the individual. In the proposed method, the visual infor-mation of the target object is shown on a touchscreen interface. The patient specifies the target position for the robot arm by drawing a line on the target object on the interface. We conducted an experiment to com-pare the proposed interface with an on-screen joystick to demonstrate the proposed system's efficiency and its ability to reduce physical burden. The results show that the proposed method is both quicker to use and ef-fectively reduces the physical burden on the user com-pared to the conventional method.