Development of a robotic haptic interface to perform vocational tasks by people with disabilities

This document describes an approach using robotic principles to develop a form of assistive technology that augments the performance of individuals with disabilities. The research conducted is expected to enhance the physical capabilities, through the use of an intelligent robotic haptic interface, in order to enhance performance related to a wide range of job-related tasks for individuals with disabilities. The enhancement in performance will increase employment opportunities. The technology will be utilized for training purposes.; Specific tasks such as approaching an object and moving it from one location to another via Teleoperation were chosen as preliminary experiments to demonstrate the implementation of the haptic interface. A study on the characterization of the tremorous inputs coming from a person with disabilities was performed and a digital signal processing approach was used to design an appropriate filter. Three manual dexterity assesment tests, commonly used in the occupational therapy field, were chosen to implement the several forms of assistance functions that were designed to augment human performance. The testbed used for these tasks consisted of a six-degree-of-freedom force-reflecting haptic interface device, PHANTOM with the GHOST SDK Software.; A separate analysis of the kinematics of a redundant seven degrees-of-freedom manipulator from the Robotics Research Corporation (RRC) was performed to simulate a complete teleoperation system consisting of the haptic device as a Master and the RRC as a slave. In addition, three tasks were chosen to demonstrate the performance of the assistance algorihtms in the real system previously mentioned.; The research demonstrated that, for the chosen tasks, the forms of assistance provided significantly reduced the execution times and enhanced the performance of the disabled individuals. These results suggest that the introduction of the haptic rendering capabilities, including force feedback, with the assistance algorithms, offers special benefit to motion-impaired users by augmenting their performance on job-related tasks.; Furthermore, the outcome of this research supports the idea that robotic setups, especially those involving the force feedback capability, can be used to expand the employment opportunities by measuring the responses resulting from training of the individuals, and making appropriate assessments of an individual's capabilities as they relate to specific jobs.