Megan McRainey
Communications
& Marketing
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Charlie Kemp, director of the Healthcare Robotics Center at Georgia Tech and Emory University, accepts a towel from El-E. |
Robots are fluent in their native language of 1 and 0 absolutes, but they struggle to grasp the nuances and imprecise nature of human language. While scientists are making slow, incremental progress in their quest to create a robot that responds to speech, gestures and body language, a more straightforward method of communication may help robots find their way into homes sooner.
A team of researchers led by Charlie Kemp, director of the Center for Healthcare Robotics in the Health Systems Institute at Tech and Emory University, have found a way to instruct a robot to find and deliver an item it may have never seen before using a more direct manner of communication—a laser pointer.
El-E (pronounced Ellie), a robot designed to help users with limited mobility with everyday tasks, autonomously moves to an item selected with a green laser pointer, picks up the item and then delivers it to the user, another person or a selected location such as a table. El-E is named for her ability to elevate her arm and for the arm’s resemblance to an elephant trunk.
To ensure that El-E will someday be ready to roll out of the lab and into the homes of patients who need assistance, the research team includes Tech Professor Julie Jacko, an expert on human-computer interaction and assistive technologies, and Jonathan Glass, director of the Emory ALS Center at the Emory University School of Medicine. El-E’s creators are gathering input from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease) patients and doctors to prepare El-E to assist patients with severe mobility challenges.
“We humans naturally point at things but we aren’t very accurate, so we use the context of the situation or verbal cues to clarify which object is important,” said Kemp, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory.
Verbal instructions given to help someone find a desired object are very difficult for a robot to process. The laser pointer interface and methods developed by Kemp’s team overcome this challenge by providing a direct way for people to communicate the location of interest to El-E and complimentary methods that enable El-E to pick up an object found at this location.
The research was presented at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction in Amsterdam on March 14 and an associated workshop on “Robotic Helpers” on March 12. |
