Georgia Tech: This Robot Can Help A Human Get Dressed In The Future

A robot that is capable of dressing human is under development by Georgia Tech to answer to the need for support from elderly people or those with injuries.

This robot, called the PR2, can put the gown on patients’ arms by sliding the top from the hand over the shoulder. More importantly, it learned the task by itself in just a day by going through more than 11,000 examples of similar actions.

After the analyzing process, the robot gains an understanding of how much force it should be using. According to Zackory Erickson, one of the students in the team, they were trying to make it mimic humans learning process of trial and error.

The simulators help the tech product to form an understanding of what human feels when they are dressed which would otherwise dangerous to do on the human subject.

What allows the PR2 to do its task precisely is the ability to project the outcome of each action, which is also a result of the simulated examples.

When the robot passed the test with simulators, the team let it try on a human. If we have to have the sense of sight to guide our action, the PR2 uses the touch to know what to do.

According to Charlie Kemp, a professor at Georgia Tech and Emory University, the most important factor is that the robot always thinks in advance to anticipate the outcome of each act. And the more it knows about us, the better it is at assisting us.

So far, the PR2 has successfully put the sleeves on. The next step is to move on to the whole piece of clothes. This advancement requires a lot more research from the team. For the time being, they are planning to present their work, Deep Haptic Model Predictive Control for Robot-Assisted Dressing on the 21st of May on the ICRA in Australia.