User modelling for personalised dressing assistance by humanoid robots

Assistive robots can improve the well-being of disabled or frail human users by reducing the burden that activities of daily living impose on them. To enable personalised assistance, such robots benefit from building a user-specific model, so that the assistance is customised to the particular set of user abilities. In this paper, we present an end-to-end approach for home-environment assistive humanoid robots to provide personalised assistance through a dressing application for users who have upper-body movement limitations. We use randomised decision forests to estimate the upper-body pose of users captured by a top-view depth camera, and model the movement space of upper-body joints using Gaussian mixture models. The movement space of each upper-body joint consists of regions with different reaching capabilities. We propose a method which is based on real-time upper-body pose and user models to plan robot motions for assistive dressing. We validate each part of our approach and test the whole system, allowing a Baxter humanoid robot to assist human to wear a sleeveless jacket.