UTCS Artificial Intelligence
courses
talks/events
demos
people
projects
publications
software/data
labs
areas
admin
A framework for planning comfortable and customizable motion of an assistive mobile robot (2009)
Shilpa Gulati
, Chetan Jhurani,
Benjamin Kuipers
, and Raul Longoria
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 boundary conditions on pose, velocity and acceleration. Such a problem can naturally be formulated as a variational optimization problem. Unlike previous work, we present a comprehensive formulation that allows the travel time to be unspecified and includes boundary conditions on position, orientation, velocity and acceleration. This makes the formulation very general as it can be used to compute trajectories for various kinds of tasks, such as starting from rest, coming to rest, moving from one specified velocity to another, arriving at a goal with a specified orientation etc. Finally, we present a fast and robust numerical method for solving the minimization problem.
View:
PDF
Citation:
In
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
2009.
Bibtex:
@inproceedings{gulati-iros-09, title={A framework for planning comfortable and customizable motion of an assistive mobile robot}, author={Shilpa Gulati and Chetan Jhurani and Benjamin Kuipers and Raul Longoria}, booktitle={IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)}, url="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ai-lab?gulati-iros-09", year={2009} }
People
Shilpa Gulati
Ph.D. Alumni
gulati [at] mail utexas edu
Benjamin Kuipers
Formerly affiliated Faculty
kuipers [at] cs utexas edu
Areas of Interest
Enabling Technologies
Robotics