Vision-Based Robot Arm Control Interface for Retrieving Objects from the Floor

Approximately half of the patients with spinal cord injuries in Japan have a cervical spinal cord injury. Owing to the trunk dysfunction, patients with high-level spinal cord injuries have particular difficulty when searching for or picking up objects from the floor. Recently, welfare robot arms have been developed to help such individuals increase self-reliance. In this study, we propose an operating system that includes an eye-in-hand system with a touchscreen interface for grasping objects from the floor and delivering them to the individual. In the proposed method, the visual information of the target object is shown on a touchscreen interface. The patient specifies the target position for the robot arm by drawing a line on the target object on the interface. We conducted an experiment to compare the proposed interface with an on-screen joystick to demonstrate the proposed system’s efficiency and its ability to reduce physical burden. The results show that the proposed method is both quicker to use and effectively reduces the physical burden on the user compared to the conventional method.