Toward Active Robot-Assisted Feeding with a General-Purpose Mobile Manipulator: Design, Evaluation, and Lessons Learned

Eating is an essential activity of daily living (ADL) for staying healthy and living at home independently. Although numerous assistive devices have been introduced, many people with disabilities are still restricted from independent eating due to the devices' physical or perceptual limitations. In this work, we introduce a new meal-assistance system using a general-purpose mobile manipulator, a Willow Garage PR2, which has the potential to serve as a versatile form of assistive technology. Our active feeding framework enables the robot to autonomously deliver food to the user's mouth. In detail, our web-based user interface, visually-guided behaviors, and safety tools allow people with severe motor impairments to benefit from the robotic assistance. We evaluated our system with 10 able-bodied participants and 9 people with motor impairments. Both groups of participants successfully ate various foods using the system and reported high rates of success for the system's autonomous behaviors in a laboratory environment. Then, we performed in-home evaluation with Henry Evans, a person with quadriplegia, at his house in California, USA. In general, Henry and the other people who operated the system reported that it was comfortable, safe, and easy-to-use. We discuss learned lessons and design insights through user evaluations.