Need Help With Your Dinner, This New Robot Is For You

Nowadays, robots are steadily replacing people doing many tasks in daily life. And in the field of taking care of elder people, they have made a breakthrough. From the University of Washington, researchers have developed a robotic system to help to feed incapable people.

Auto feeding robot

What will you feel if you have to depend on another person to spoon feed you every day? It takes away your independence, doesn't it? That's what Siddhartha Srinivasa, a Professor at Boeing Endowed in Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering have conducted.

So their goal with this feeding system is to give elder people back more control in their lives.

This new auto feeding machine is quite new and not really precise yet. It is still in the development process but one thing we know is that we could attach it to the wheelchairs - greatly improve its mobility. However, build this system up is not an easy task.

According to the co-author Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee at Allen School, this was not an easy project to start with. For example, like when his team first started the project they ran into the problem of many different ways that people eat their foods.

To resolve that problem we have to conduct many experiments to see how human eat food like carrots and grapes.

Their team has conducted many experiments on different volunteer groups. In these experiments, they have told the volunteers to fork feed a mannequin with a force sensor. So they have found out that people use different ways to feed depending on the softness and size of the food.

Combine many algorithms

So after that, they realized that for the robot to become a better feeder - it needs a feeding and skewering system that can adapt with many food items. So to accomplish that the team has combined two algorithms.

One algorithm in charge of detection of the food on the plate, while the other one is in charge of telling which is the best way to pick it up.
The team is now working closely with many caregivers and elderly people in facilities to improve the robot. The objective is not to replace caregivers but rather to help them in their work.