目で操作する上肢障害者用食事支援ロボット

抄録

The number of people with disabilities is growing in Japan. Since the people with upper limb disability have difficulties in eating, a system to help eating is required. Traditional assistant robots are operated with joysticks or touch sensors. However, people with upper limb disability cannot operate the robots fully. Therefore, we propose a maneuverable meal assistance robot operated with eyes. User can have meal using the robot by eye manipulation. Its operation interface consists a tablet PC connected web camera calculating motion of user's eyes. The terminal detects position of user's eyes on the face image. The barycenter vector is calculated between barycenter of sclera and iris. The motion of eyes is decided from the magnitude and direction of the calculated vector. By the proposed method, user can manipulate the robot by eyes. Moreover, the designed robot with independent arms offers stable motions and quiet operations by using ultrasonic motors. In this paper, the details about the robot will be introduced.