A framework for planning comfortable and customizable motion of an assistive mobile robot

Abstract— Assistive mobile robots that can navigate autonomously can greatly benefit people with mobility impairments. Since an assistive mobile robot transports a human user from one place to another, its motion should be comfortable for human users. Moreover, it should be possible for users to customize the motion according to their comfort. While there exists a large body of work on motion planning for mobile robots, very little attention has been paid to characterizing comfort and planning comfortable trajectories. In this paper, we first characterize comfortable motion by formulating a measure of discomfort as a weighted sum of the total travel time and time integrals of various kinematic quantities. We then present a method for factoring the weights such that once a user has customized the weights for one task, the same choice of weights leads to similar average value of the discomfort measure in other tasks. We seek trajectories that minimize the discomfort and satisfy bound...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IROS
• Authors: Shilpa Gulati, Chetan Jhurani, Benjamin Kuipers, Raul Longoria
• Keywords: Assistive Mobile Robot, Human Users, IROS 2009, Mobile Robots, Robotics