Human friendly interfaces of robotic manipulator control system for handicapped persons

This paper presents a new Human Robot Interface (HRI) for the spinal cord injured person and a control scheme of the robot manipulator for the developed interface. The system is mainly aimed at people with C3 and C4 injuries who cannot move below the shoulder. HRI consists of a laser pointer and a pressure sensor. The interface makes a 3 DOF motion. The user controls the position of a red spot on the white board that is located on the robot wrist and the manipulator changes its position so that the red spot is always centered at the white board. By doing so, 2 DOF motion is controlled by the positioning of the laser pointer and one additional DOF motion is controlled by "sip and puff." Additionally, voice recognition has been added to the interface so that the user can change the mode of robot control and turn on and off the robot and the developed interface. Using this interface and voice recognition, the disabled person can effectively control the translation and rotation of the end effector position manually. Additionally, the robot maximum velocity is changed with the fuzzy algorithm. Therefore, user can control the maximum speed of the robot. The interface's usefulness is verified by clinical experiments with seven subjects.